The TCM Water Authority still diverted a small percentage of the water back into a small fraction of its former self, to maintain a desolate tourist park. The fringe of palms and tamarisk surrounding it were signposted as being reminiscent of “the primeval wetlands of Borrego Springs or Ocotillo Wells, eastward of The Barrens.” Reed brakes choked the seeps. Water grazers kept pond-sized patches open. The springs were divided by a Founder wall designed to keep salt from fresh. One end had stone arches carved in animal reliefs. An abandoned rehabilitation project had aimed to add a second pool system: all that remained was cracked mud and dust.
Staff poured the visitors honey-sweetened tea in little glasses, then left them to wander through the brakes to an adobe observation hut overlooking a bucolic wallow.
Refreshed, Asach and the boys next headed north through Ezekiel itself for a two-dinar wheel repair. Shops catering to the highway trade were bedecked with plush and plasticene and plaster Tweety Kitties (did people here even know of Tweety Kitty?). Asach wondered: in this teamster world, is it plush for girls, plasticene for boys, and plaster for the garden? Cascades of nuts and seeds and spices and tins; cheeses in oil; unidentifiable fruits in syrup lined shop shelves. The road into town crossed onto basalt fields as sharply as crossing a watered pitch, past a series of once grand, now abandoned guest houses, and then the black blocks of Ezekiel’s castle loomed: the Founder’s wartime headquarters, with its two-ton solid basalt door.
They rolled onward toward Bonneville along the southern road, through horizon-wide pebble plains, trackless and capped with desert varnish, grazed clean of any puff of chaff. Along a long-dry wadi lay Amra Tabernacle—a little Founder-era bubble with a roadway tourist sign. Concrete cones, a meter high, ran parallel awhile: markers along the old First Empire Mandate track. They careened behind, through, alongside truck convoys ferrying limestone nodules the size of squashed dumpsters to facing-tile plants on the outskirts of Saint George. Foursquare, turreted Castle Peery rose above a second wadi, overlooking a Founder’s-Era landfill. Dust devils boiled past flocks of desolate sheep, fed with trucked grain; watered by tankers; allowed to graze to scorched earth any seed that dared germinate under the moisture-sapping wind. They passed a transporter overtopped with green reed headed toward the sheep camps.
Bonneville, New Utah
They were ten days on the road, and arrived in Bonneville at the last violet of dusk, rolling to a stop outside a battered hotel just as stars punctured the vault of heaven. By the time they clambered over one another and milled toward the grimy door, the black of night had sapped all color, flattened objects to silhouettes, and sharpened every footstep into a staccato echo. Asach, wrapped in a shapeless, hooded cloak, faded to the rear, allowing the farm boys to shove their way ahead into the shabby lobby. They did all the talking.
“Rum long tripela man bai kostim hamas?” How much is a room for three?
The desk clerk feigned indifference. “Yu no save long tok anglis, a? Man bilong wokim gaden, a? Pilgrim, a? ” You don’t speak Anglic, huh? Farmer, huh? Pilgrim, huh?
“Well, yeah, grinned the lummox with the shotgun, still sporting his shades. As a matter of fact, I do. Speak Anglic.”
The clerk snorted.
“Umm, yeah,” grinned the driver. “About 12,000 hectares.” Still grinning. “Farmer, I mean.” Still grinning. “You know, Saint George? Little TCM—garden plot—just outside Saint George?”
The clerk blanched. These weren’t Himmist hicks.
Shotgun leaned elbows in the desk, which rather emphasized the sling crossing his several acres of chest. Still grinning. “Imagine!” he chirped brightly, “You’re right three for three! That one,” (he jerked his head rearwards) is the—pilgrim? Is that what you said? Did you actually say, pilgrim?”
Now thoroughly confused, the clerk gaped until rescued by the driver who, still grinning, gave a little shrug. “Thing is, best not to Stick your nose in, if you follow my meaning?”
The clerk nodded.
“So then, brother, “ he smiled, “how much is a room for three?”
They trudged upstairs, past sallow walls, into a poured concrete wing that at best had only ever been elegant in a developer’s imagination. The flimsy door banged open, revealing a tawdry suite with smoke-stained walls. A wheezing air conditioner struggled unsuccessfully with the heat. Asach pulled back heavy curtains, sodden with the odors of ages, to reveal grimy French windows that opened onto a miniscule balcony. The balcony could accommodate two chairs, or two people standing, but not both at once. To sit, you had to pull the chairs into the room, then plunk-and-scoot your way back out to the rusty railing.
Not that the view was worth the trouble. The balcony faced an inner courtyard; far-below, stained concrete circled an algae-rimed pool. Bad music blared from a makeshift bandstand in one corner. Bored guests attending a bad suit convention stared into their drinks.
“And to think, “ said Asach into the murky air, “this is the luxury wing.”
“At full rack rates,” nodded the brothers.
“Come on,” sighed Asach, not bothering to close the doors, “I know a better place.”
Saint George, New Utah
In the end, Asach’s “defection,” as HG called the no-show status, proved to be The Librarian’s own ticket off the transport returning to Maxroy’s Purchase.
“Got to have somebody to keep tabs on things,” said HG, though how, concretely, any report of this was to be accomplished, given the absence of any direct communications means, was unclear to The Librarian.
The Librarian did have a name: Colchis Barthes. A long-limbed man with silver hair, Barthes would appear quizzically unruffled and immaculately pressed in the midst of a hailstorm. Or, more appropriately, as the case might be here on New Utah, in the midst of a dust storm.
Barthes had distinguished himself as head of American Collections at the Imperial Library on Sparta. It was an odd sort of division within the library: The “Americas” were a grab-bag of worlds that shared only one common denominator: their names were derived from millennium-old names of states and territories on Earth.
Actually, this implied a second (and really, a defining) denominator: these worlds tended toward self-styled traditionalisms, linguistic revivals, and archaic information preservation societies. Hence The Librarian’s slow, patient rise through the ranks. He could read Old and Middle Anglic fluently, and was an adept at locating and recovering the flotsam of a previous information age. It was amazing what people had, figuratively speaking, tucked into their shoes across thirty generations; what church records they had defended with their lives; or what just plain turned up in long-forgotten archives. One entire city library had been miraculously preserved on a thousand-year-old flash drive, disguised (or designed?) as a piece of jewelry. Of course, no machine now existed that could decode the thing, but that’s where Colchis came into it.
As the home world of the Imperial line, New Washington had naturally been of special collector interest, and that is where Barthes had earned his reputation. After the Imperial Restoration, interest also surged in archival recovery on New Chicago—his first assignment in the Trans-Coal Sack sector. Naturally, that work done, he’d been handy, so it seemed useful that he be assigned to the second New Utah accession mission.
But New Utah was a far cry from his previous patrician career postings. He had, of course, been assigned to a Cultural Attaché here or there several times during his younger years, but always during less interesting times. He had enjoyed rambling through street markets and media stalls, rifling through junk and stumbling upon entire collections turned out of some grandmother’s locker.