Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore (26 page)

Wait—the whole system? As in, the
whole
system? The Big Box?

Kat is grinning. She’s an artillery officer who’s just gotten her hands on a really big gun. Now she looks up at her audience—the fellowship. She cups her hands around her mouth: “That was just the warm-up!”

There’s a countdown splashed across the screens. Giant rainbow numbers go 5 (red), 4 (green), 3 (blue), 2 (yellow) …

And then, on a sunny Friday morning, for three seconds, you can’t search for anything. You can’t check your email. You can’t watch any videos. You can’t get directions. For just three seconds, nothing works, because every single one of Google’s computers around the world is dedicated to this task.

Make that a really,
really
big gun.

The screens go blank, pure white. There’s nothing to show because too much is happening now, more than you could ever display on a bank of four screens, or forty, or four thousand. Every transformation that can be applied to this text is being applied. Every possible error is being accounted for, every optical eigenvalue is being inveigled. Every question you can ask a sequence of letters is being asked.

Three seconds later, the interrogation is complete. The amphitheater is quiet. The fellowship is holding its breath—except for the oldest, the man in the wheelchair, who’s drawing a long, rattling wheeze in through his mouth. Penumbra’s eyes are shining and expectant.

“Well? What have we got?” Kat says.

The screens are bright, and they hold the answer.

“Guys? What have we got?”

Silence from the Googlers. The screens are blank. The Big Box is empty. After all that: nothing. The amphitheater is silent. Across the lawn, one of the brass band’s snare drums goes
rat-a-tat
.

I find Penumbra’s face in the crowd. He looks utterly stricken, still staring down at the screens, waiting for something, anything, to appear. You can see the questions piling up on his face:
What does this mean? What did they do wrong? What did I do wrong?

Down below, the Googlers are wearing sour expressions, whispering to one another. Igor is still bent over his keyboard, still trying things. Sparks of color flash and fizzle on his screen.

Kat comes slowly up the steps. She looks dejected and disheartened—worse than when she thought she’d been passed over for the PM. “Well, I guess they’re wrong,” she says, waving weakly at the fellowship. “There’s no message here. It’s just noise. We tried everything.”

“Well, not
everything
, right—”

She looks up hotly. “Yes, everything. Clay: we just dialed in the equivalent of, like, a million years’ worth of human effort. It came up empty.” Her face is flushed—angry, or embarrassed, or both. “There’s nothing here.”

Nothing.

What are the possibilities here? Either this code is so subtle, so complex, that the most powerful computational force in the history of the world can’t crack it—or there’s nothing here at all, and the fellowship has been wasting its time, all five hundred years of it.

I try to find Penumbra’s face again. I search the amphitheater, casting my eyes up and down the mass of the fellowship. There’s Tyndall, whispering to himself; Fedorov, sitting in a pensive lump; Rosemary Lapin, smiling faintly. And then I spot him: a tall stick figure wobbling across Google’s green lawns, almost to the stand of trees on the other side, moving fast, not looking back.

And this, the last and greatest of his schemes—it will not succeed, either.

I start to jog after him, but I’m out of shape, and how is he so fast, anyway? I huff and puff across the lawn, toward the spot where I saw him last. When I get there, he’s gone. Google’s chaotic campus rises up all around me, rainbow arrows pointing every way at once, and here the walkways curve off in five different directions. He’s gone.

It is foolishness, and it will fail, and what then?

Penumbra is gone.

THE TOWER

LITTLE BITS OF METAL

M
ATROPOLIS HAS TAKEN OVER
the living room. Mat and Ashley have hauled the couch away, and to navigate around the room you follow a narrow channel between the card tables: the winding Mittelriver, complete with two bridges. The commercial district has matured, and new towers push past the old airship dock, nearly touching the ceiling. I suspect Mat might build something up there, too. Soon Matropolis will annex the sky.

It’s past midnight, and I can’t sleep. I still haven’t been able to reclaim my circadian rhythm, even though it’s been a week since our late-night photo shoot. So now I am lying on the floor, drowning deep in the Mittelriver, dubbing
The Dragon-Song Chronicles
.

The audiobook edition I bought for Neel was produced in 1987 and the distributor’s catalog did not specify that it still comes on cassette tapes. Cassette tapes! Or maybe it did specify that, and I just missed it in the excitement of the bulk order. In any case, I still want Neel to have the audiobooks, so I bought a black Sony Walkman for seven dollars on eBay and I am now playing the tapes into my laptop, rerecording them, shepherding them one by one into the great digital jukebox in the sky.

The only way to do this is in real time, so basically I have to sit and listen to the first two volumes in their entirety again. But that’s not so bad, because the audiobooks are read by Clark Moffat himself. I’ve never heard him speak, and it’s spooky, knowing what I know about him now. He has a good voice, gravelly but clear, and I can imagine it echoing in the bookstore. I can imagine the first time Moffat came through the door—the tinkle of the bell, the creak of the floorboards.

Penumbra would have asked:
What do you seek in these shelves?

Moffat would have looked around, taken the measure of the place—noticed the shadowy reaches of the Waybacklist, certainly—and then he might have said:
Well, what would a wizard read?

Penumbra would have smiled at that.

Penumbra.

He has vanished, and his bookstore stands derelict. I have no idea where to find him.

In a flash of genius, I checked the domain registration for penumbra.com, and sure enough: he owns it. It was purchased in the primordial era of the web by Ajax Penumbra and renewed in 2007 with an optimistic ten-year term … but the registration only lists the store’s address on Broadway. Further googling yielded nothing. Penumbra casts only the faintest digital shadow.

In another, somewhat dimmer flash of genius, I tracked down silver-haired Muriel and her goat farm, just south of San Francisco in a foggy cluster of fields called Pescadero. She hadn’t heard from him, either. “He’s done this before,” she said. “Gone away. But—he does usually call.” Her smooth face made a little frown and the microwrinkles around her eyes darkened. When I left, she gave me a little palm-sized wheel of fresh goat cheese.

And so, in a final desperate flash, I opened the scanned pages of
PENVMBRA
. Google couldn’t crack
MANVTIVS
, but these latter-day
codex vitae
were not so cunningly encrypted, and besides (I was fairly sure), there was actually something in this book to be decoded. I sent Kat an inquiring text message, and her response was short and definitive:
No.
Thirteen seconds later:
Absolutely not.
Seven more:
That project is done.

Kat had been deeply disappointed when the Great Decoding failed. She had really believed there would be something profound waiting for us in that text; she had
wanted
there to be something profound. Now she was throwing herself into the PM and mostly ignoring me. Except, of course, to say
Absolutely not
.

But that was probably for the best. The two-page spreads on my laptop screen—heavy Gerritszoon glyphs lit harshly by the GrumbleGear camera flashes—still made me feel strange. Penumbra’s expectation was that his
codex vitae
wouldn’t be read until after he was gone. I decided I wouldn’t crack open a man’s book of life just to find his home address.

Finally, genius depleted, I checked with Tyndall and Lapin and Fedorov. None of them had heard from Penumbra, either. They were all preparing to move east, to take refuge with the Unbroken Spine in New York and join Corvina’s chain gang there. If you ask me, it’s futile: we took Manutius’s
codex vitae
and bent it until it broke. At best, the fellowship is founded on a false hope, and at worst, it’s founded on a lie. Tyndall and the rest haven’t faced up to this, but at some point they’ll have to.

If all of this seems grim: it is. And I feel terrible because, if you trace it back step-by-step, you cannot avoid the fact that all of it is my fault.

My mind is wandering. It’s taken me many nights to get this far again, but Moffat is finally wrapping up
Volume II
. I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say, it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes:

“The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought,” Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach’s treasure. “And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here—none that I can detect.”

Moffat’s Zenodotus voice is not what I expected. Instead of a rich, dramatic wizard’s rumble, it’s clipped and clinical. It’s the voice of a corporate magic consultant.

Fernwen’s eyes widened at that. Hadn’t they just braved a swamp of horrors to reclaim this enchanted trumpet? And now the First Wizard claimed it carried no real power at all?

“Magic is not the only power in this world,” the old mage said gently, handing the horn back to its royal owner. “Griffo made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs. I wish that I could do the same.”

With Moffat reading, I can hear the sinister intent in the First Wizard’s voice. It’s so obvious what’s coming:

“Even Aldrag the Wyrm-Father would envy such a thing.”

Wait, what?

So far, every line out of Moffat’s mouth has been pleasant repetition. His voice has been a needle bobbing comfortably through a deep groove in my brain. But that line—I have never read that line.

That line is new.

My finger twitches over the Walkman’s pause button, but I don’t want to mess up Neel’s recording. Instead, I pad quickly to my room and pull
Volume II
from the shelf. I flip to the end, and yes, I’m right: there’s no mention of Aldrag the Wyrm-Father here. He was the first dragon to sing, and he used the power of his dragon-song to forge the first dwarves out of molten rock, but that’s not the point—the point is, that line is
not
in the book.

So what else isn’t in the book? What else is different? Why is Moffat freestyling?

These audiobooks were produced in 1987, just after
Volume III
had been published. Therefore, it was also just after Clark Moffat’s entanglement with the Unbroken Spine. My spider-sense is tingling: this is connected.

But I can think of only three people in the world who might possess clues to Moffat’s intent. The first is the dark lord of the Unbroken Spine, but I have absolutely no desire to communicate with Corvina or any of his henchmen at the Festina Lente Company, above- or belowground. Besides, I’m still afraid my IP address might be listed on one of their pirate rosters.

The second is my erstwhile employer, and I have a deep desire to communicate with Penumbra, but I don’t know how. Lying here on the floor, listening to the hiss of empty tape, I realize something very sad: this skinny, blue-eyed man bent my life into a crazy curlicue … and all I know about him is what it says on the front of his store.

There is a third possibility. Edgar Deckle is technically part of Corvina’s crew, but he has a few things going for him:

1. He’s an established coconspirator.

2. He guards the door to the Reading Room, so he must be pretty high up in the fellowship, and therefore have access to many secrets.

3. He knew Moffat. And, most important of all:

4. He’s in the phone book. Brooklyn.

It feels appropriately weighty and Unbroken Spine-ish to send him a letter. This is something I haven’t done in more than a decade. The last letter I wrote in ink on paper was a mushy missive to my long-distance pseudo-girlfriend in the gold-tinted week after science camp. I was thirteen. Leslie Murdoch never wrote back.

For this new epistle, I select heavy archival-grade paper. I purchase a sharp-tipped rollerball pen. I carefully compose my message, first explaining all that transpired up on Google’s bright screens and then asking Edgar Deckle what he knows, if anything, about Clark Moffat’s audiobook editions. I crumple six sheets of the archival-grade paper in the process because I keep misspelling words or smashing them together. My handwriting is still terrible.