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.