Page 40

“And you're custody.”

“I am funding, security, climate control, and fourteen decades of accumulated conservation practice.” He's warming to it, and the terrible thing is that he's good. “Do you know what happens if you file this with the Frontier Historical Authority tomorrow? Nine governments file competing claims inside a month. The Authority has an annual budget smaller than my shipping account. There will be a garrison here within the year and a mining survey within five, because this is a frontier planet with no defense treaty and something under it that four powers will each decide they cannot allow the others to hold.”

“So the alternative is you own it.”

“The alternative is that it is preserved, intact, by an entity with the means to preserve it, and studied by scholars I select, and published — I do publish, Miss Marlow, check the record — at a pace that doesn't ignite a war.” He puts both hands on the console edge. “Stay. That is my offer and it is entirely serious. Direct the work. Choose the team. I will fund your village, endow your school, and put your uncle's name on the site in letters two meters high. In return I ask for the acquisition rights on duplicate material and the right to be consulted. That is all.”

And here's the thing I have to be honest about, because I promised myself I would be.

For about four seconds, part of me wants to say yes.

Not the money. The other part. Running it. Picking the people. Thirty-one years of a dead man's homework and I could spend forty years in these nineteen chambers with the resources to do it properly, and Mountmend gets a school, and Pip gets a future that isn't a boat.

Then my eye goes to the console under Selka's hand, and I think about the word duplicate.

“No,” I say.

“Consider it for a day.”

“I don't need a day. You said duplicate material and acquisition rights, which means the archive gets copied and the copies get sold, and that's fine, that's the sales pitch, I understand it.” I take a step toward him, which is possibly stupid. “But you don't actually want the archive, Mr Vane. If you wanted the archive you'd have filed the location a year ago and let the Authority have the war. You want to be the man who decides who reads it.”

His face does not change. That's how I know.

“And that's the whole thing,” I say. “This room has held the origin of every thinking species anybody has ever met. Ten thousand years, free, to anyone who walked in. You'd be the first person in the history of it to put a door on.”

The quiet that follows is unlike anything I've encountered.

“Rekk,” says Vane. “The components.”

Rekk takes the artifacts. He does it without hurry and without malice, sweeping the eight of them into a padded case with the care of somebody who has handled a lot of expensive property, and I stand and watch, because the alternative is Selka's hand coming out from under that console.

“Fourteen minutes,” she says, so quietly that it's meant for me alone.

So I give her fourteen minutes.

I do it by asking Cassian Vane about the expeditions that never came home, and he answers, because he has been alone with this for twenty-nine years and I am the first person he has ever been able to explain it to. He tells me about the crew he lost in the northern weirs. He describes a woman named Anwen Reyes whose expedition he financed and then removed, and he uses the word removed, and he tells me the year.

I let him talk, and while he talks I lean on the console with both hands, and with my right thumb I do the only clever thing available to me.

The relay console has a local write. Selka showed me at the start, because she thought I might need to log a find. It writes to the archive itself — into the same repository that has been keeping records for a hundred centuries, in the same protected format, appended and unerasable.

I write out all two hundred eleven values. Then the forty-one-press sequence. Then, because there's room and my fingers are steadier than they have any business being, everything I have reconstructed of the final approach.

If we all die in this room, the observatory keeps it. Somebody walks in here in another thousand years and finds my uncle's work in the same file as the makers'.

“That's it,” Selka breathes. “It's away. All of it, three destinations.”

Cassian Vane stops mid-sentence. He has extremely good hearing for a man of fifty-one.

“What is away.”

“The authentication,” Selka says, standing up. “Full survey record, provenance chain, and a sealed statement from an Authority archaeologist. Two colleagues and a legal depository. You can buy one of those. You cannot buy all three inside forty minutes.”

Something moves behind the manners at last.

“Rekk,” he says.

And then the lights in the corridor behind him go out one after another, far end first, the way somebody walks a corridor putting out lamps.