To his credit, he was appalled at the state in which he’d found New Utah’s (well, Saint George’s) Zion University library. He stood, hand pressed to his face in horror, before the melted wreckage of one Scriptorium—Scriptorium!—Actual, hand-lettered manuscripts, pre-dating First Empire!—now reduced to a gutted, ash-filled shell, inhabited by mangy dogs.

Three small boys appeared with rocks. They pelted the dogs. His guide pointed to what had been: There was the melted slag of a stained glass wall that had once soared above the foyer, casting flower fields of light on the reading benches on every floor. There was where the genealogical archives had stood: the papers, diaries, notes and bibles that hung flesh on the bare bones of the begats. There had been an alcove, where the notes and diaries and unfinished research plans of retired and deceased professors had been stored. Colchis stood aghast, contemplating a massive charred beam, a double-hand span wide to a side, adze-marks preserved in charcoal. It was all that remained of the timbered ceiling. He reached out and shoved it with his foot. Unsteady on its bed of rubble, it rolled lazily over.

Colchis scuffed absent-mindedly through the incongruously unburned stripe of shattered brick and mortar that had been insulated by the timber. Clearly, the fireball had exploded though from the floor above, collapsing the ceiling before consuming all below it. He traced the grey stripe, amazed at the intensity of heat that had reduced everything else around it to white ash. Then he stopped. A charred edge poked through the wrack. Expecting a flake; a fragment, he was surprised when a light tug failed to dislodge it. He brushed away the fist-deep overburden. The charred edge belonged to a clipped sheaf of hand-written paper, miraculously preserved.

It was a conference paper, a little over eighty years old. Something to do with the biology of something called a Swenson’s Ape. Sad, that of all the things that might have been saved, all that remained of the vast collection was a random draft of a minor bit of academic arcana. There was no name on it, just the date.

“Any idea who wrote this?” He showed the title to his guide.

The student shrugged. “Some dead professor or other. Hard to know now. The catalogue went up with the library. You might check with the Temple archivist. Some of our collections were backed up there. Not all of them.”

Barthes handed her the paper. She shrugged again, then swiveled, hands out, to take in the ruin. “If you’re going to the Temple, you might as well hang onto it. I have nowhere to put it. Maybe they can find a related file.”

A week passed before Barthes thought of the paper again. The reconstruction effort itself had been all-consuming. It wasn’t just that New Utah had a different language and business culture for all things informatic (which it did). It was not just that it had its own mature bureaucratic system, accounting methods, and paperwork (there were bitstreams of that, too). The biggest impediment was that it was clearly a post-war reconstruction zone.

He couldn’t just pop in a ‘tooth and call anyone, because the dish system still didn’t work, and anyway most people didn’t have them. He couldn’t just set an appointment, because that would tell the assassins (yes, he discovered, there were assassins) exactly the time and place to murder whomever he was meeting. So he had to just show up, and hope that the office he was visiting was open, and that whomever he needed was there.

When he did that, traffic was utterly unpredictable. Whenever the TCM, private security teams, or a True Church VIP was moving (unannounced of course), they closed half the roads through the city, turning freeways into parking lots. About half the time—and an unpredictable half of the time—offices were just closed. Whenever there was a big security alert, which happened in unpredictable clusters, everything just shut down. At Zion University, there were no summer classes, so to save salary and electricity the campus was closed. If contractors showed up, they were turned away three times out of four, for lack of guides.

And the big True Church construction contractors and projects—Titan-Van Zandt, Tumbridge, Orcutt Land and Mining—were sucking the city dry of qualified managers. There was just a lot more money to be made working for them than for one stray Librarian. So there might have been plenty of workmen, but there were few to direct them, and even fewer to manage routine back office matters like invoicing.

Then there was the 130-degree heat. That was not an exaggeration. The city electricity cycled in two-hour on, (hopefully only) four-hour off increments, on an unpredictable schedule. Usually it cycled off-phase, which meant that it wouldn't actually run many appliances, like air conditioners, and it fried computational electronics. So, everyone sweated through the night and arrived to work exhausted. There were backup generators, but in Saint George most of those were True-Church contracted, meaning that they ran on fuel cells, not solar, and the hydrogen extractors down on the coast were only operating at about twenty percent capacity. You couldn’t legally fill fuel cylinders (to prevent black marketing), so to refuel the cells you had to wait in line, fill a FLIVR, drive it home, and in a bloody dangerous operation siphon the fuel out of the FLIVR’s tank and into the generator’s.

Colchis was buffered from this somewhat at his hotel—they managed to keep the air conditioning going some of the time, so his room temperature at night stayed down to around 90 degrees, which was livable with a fan—but the people working for him did not have that luxury. Compared to those unpredictabilities, sorting through a budget variance felt pretty minor, and tracking down the long-dead author of a paper presented at a Xenobiology plenary session was nowhere on his charts.

Lying on his bed one night, spread-eagled to enjoy the full cooling effects of his fan, Barthes glanced again at the title page. It was dated 2867, for a conference somewhere in New Caledonia. He amended his assessment. For a paper never even presented at a conference. That was the year of the True Church uprising on Maxroy’s Purchase. That’s when its newly-hatched military wing had burned and looted cities across that planet, destroyed their churches, withdrawn its Temple to Glacier Valley, proclaimed itself primate, transported thousands into exile, and established its Security Zone on New Utah.

And then, were that not enough, came the collapse of New Utah’s Alderson tramline, effectively ending interstellar travel for all but the extremely wealthy. Barthes wasn’t sure that the New Caledonia conference had ever been held, but it was dead cert that the poor biologist, beavering away in the backwaters of Zion University, had not attended. Making the paper’s lone survivorship all the more poignant. He held it up in the guttering light from the indifferently-powered bulb, and fell asleep before he’d finished the first paragraph.

New Scotland

HG arrived back in New Caledonia in a flurry and a huff, so puffed with self-importance and wounded pride that Horvath himself felt obliged to talk him down from his high horse.

“Now look here,” said Horvath, “are you saying that Quinn violated the technology ban? That’s a serious charge. Don’t levy it unless you’ve got proof that will stand up in a formal inquiry.”

“Well, no. It’s just that Quinn’s so impossible to—to—control.”

Renner snorted. “I’m impressed. I don’t know anyone with any sense who’d even try.”

Horvath noted, but ignored, the implied insult. “Young man,”—only in comparison to Horvath could HG reasonably called young—”it’s not my position—and therefore not yours—to control Quinn.”