Sunlight rolled across the tawny, intermittently furred body of the cave girl. Her chin was up, her face turned away from the sun, and a bright red lower lip stuck out in an imperious pout. Matt turned the page.
He reached for the diet Dr. Pepper that he always kept on hand while brainstorming. The caffeine might stimulate a best-seller yet, or at least prod a sluggish and frustrated imagination. His latest prospective million-seller, “Ascent of the Ruby Slippers”, had run into snarls.
Chapter five of the Yellow Section saw its band of questers working with Losaigon, who located a vital clue to the whereabouts of the Lost Tower of the Eighth Veil in the yellowed pages of a Craig Rice paperback, a relic lovingly tended since “The Elder Days”. In looking it over now, Matt found this passage to be amazingly boring, surpassing the tedium of anything he had ever committed to a page. The copyright to the Craig Rice passage would probably need to be cleared, too. Who knew who held that, these days? And though Losaigon had once seemed a reasonable name for the circulation librarian in a rat-infested post-holocaust library, Matt could now see “Saigon” sitting smack in the middle to distract the potential reader.
So at the very least, he needed a new name for the librarian (who would probably be better as a reference librarian). Maybe library, librarian, and Craig Rice could all be jettisoned for some new exhilarating scene which would be spoken of by reviewers and students of fantasy literature for years to come. He had only to think it up. In hopes that some image would suggest a suitable replacement, he was flipping through “Yellowbacks of Gor: Great DAW Cover Paintings”.
Another cave girl gazed up at him past the leatherbound man with the branding iron. Natt sipped at the Dr. Pepper. So far, no sultry cave girls appeared in his story at all, but one could appear, solving some part of the problem. She might make a fine librarian.
He turned to the next page. A tall, emaciated woman came through the dining room toward the living room, distracting him from the plumper though two-dimensional women. She waved her coffee cup toward the windows. “The sun was shining when I got up, turning her head so got, brilliant light poured into every age-etched line. “But now it doesn’t look so very good.”
Stepping back, she turned away from the window. “Are you reading?” she demanded, squinting at Matt. “Here. Let me turn on this light for you.”
Before her hand could reach the light switch, Matt closed the book loudly enough for her to hear it. “No thanks,” he said. “About time to be getting down to the bus.”
“Already?” She glanced at her bare left wrist. “You work too hard. You should get a rest.”
“Foo,” he told her, rising. “I could’ve told you that.” He put the book back among its neighbors on the shelf, drained his Dr. Pepper, and started for the door, by way of the kitchen. His mother followed.
The glass went into the sink and Matt moved past the refrigerator to the front door, where his coat waited for him. “See you at six,” he said, shrugging massive shoulders into it. “You won’t let anyone into the place while I’m out, okay?”
“Oh, of course,” she said, as she always did. She sipped at her coffee while Matt buttoned his coat. “Oh, well, now, wait.” Those nice women who like to talk about mysteries are coming over this afternoon.”
Matt grimaced. He had not, so far, met these women, and he didn’t like strangers coming into the apartment, certainly not when his mother was alone. Still, they had visited yesterday, and had committed no murders, stolen no invaluable paperweights, or rummaged in the cupboard for peanut brittle.
“What do they come to talk about? Their favorite books? Books in general? Or are they budding garden variety authors themselves?”
His mother shrugged and waved the coffee cup. “Oh, this and that.”
Matt hadn’t expected much more of an answer. At least half of Mrs. Benz’s vagueness was assumed, but not all, ad it was true that she had reached that point in her career where what she wrote most was her own name. She had started a Regency romance, quite a departure for her, to be called “The Noble and the Nubile”, but this had petered out, rather to the author’s relief. She might restart it, or begin a new mystery in her long-running series, this winter: cold weather seemed to give her stamina. Having fans drop by wouldn’t hurt.
“Just don’t be giving away any signed limited editions,” he told her. He reached down for his briefcase. “And be sure they aren’t selling these interviews to Stripes Magazine or some such.”
“I shall sign nothing but autograph albums.”
A paper bag sat on the floor. Matt snatched it up and thrust it inside the briefcase. He was sure he had already loaded his lunch into the case this morning, but the things you did every morning were easiest to neglect. You remembered doing them, but what you remembered was doing them yesterday, and you wound up eating Pop Tarts from the vending machine.
He had to be quick about it, or she would want to inspect the lunch and try to double the amount of food. “Well, off to the salt mines,” he said loudly, to cover the sound of the latch on the briefcase.
She kissed his cheek. “Bad for your health. Tell them to switch you to the low sodium mines.”
“Ha! They’d just assign me to the pepper mills.” He moved out into the hall, toward the elevator, pausing long enough to hear her close and lock the door.
In the lobby, Matt paused as Gaston gave the revolving door a push for him. Being careful to act as if it was just a random thought, he said “Say, do you, er, know the women who came to see my mother yesterday?”
“No, Mr. Benz,” Gaston replied. “I only saw the one, and your mother seemed to know her. Is there a problem?”
Matt shrugged. Gaston had no time for long explanations. “Not really. Just wondered.” He moved on outside.
Sunny as it was, there was a hint of impending Christmas in the air. Sloshing through sloppy snow to the bus stop at the corner, Matt murmured a magic spell to make the Number Eleven prompter than usual. This had never worked before, and once again he had time to calculate the cost of keeping a car in the city, right down to the quarters for the Robomatic Car Wash (which had been shut down years ago, but fantasy was fantasy.) As he stepped up and swiped his care card across the glass box, he concluded that even on his recently augmented salary he didn’t care to risk it.
He pushed off the bus not a mass of fellow city-slaves downtown, and shouldered his way to the building, through the metal detector, and into the elevator. In time, he arrived at the city’s Information resources Center, referred to by everyone inside the city government as “Down”. Whenever one of Them needed facts farther away than two key presses, They ordered these from the central library, commanding, “Call Down and see if you can get this” or “Send what’s-his-name Down for that stuff about Streets and San”. It would then be the job of Matt or one of his subordinates to plow through acres of paper, consult little blue numbers of a pale blue screen, or make necessary phone calls for the facts requested. Now and then a few dozen sources would need to be consulted, and data summarized for Their use.
File shelves and cabinets, the heart of Down, took up eighty-five percent of the floor space. One day, everyone had bee assured, this would all be available on magnetic tape…large vinyl square…small plastic discs…a cloud. Somehow contract negotiations had always gone awry. So for now, and the foreseeable future, the staff of Down resided in tiny cubicles that hugged the walls, trying not to infringe on the space for ever-expanding vital information. Matt’s cubicle was prime real estate, with a door that locked and nine foot walls, placing him above peons with mere six foot walls, or even no door.
Matt’s cubicle was the first one unlocked this morning, as it nearly always was. Inside, his status was further proclaimed by the presence of an entire window and three chairs. One of these was behind a broad, littered desk, for sitting on. Matt used the other two for storage and for tripping on.
He flipped his briefcase up onto the clean portion of the desk and popped it open. He bent to slide open his lower right hand drawer and tossed his lunch inside. Then he sat up to close the briefcase again, and stared at the paper bag sitting inside it.
He opened the desk draw again to make sure. The other bag sat there unimpressed.
Gingerly, he put one index finger into the briefcase and poked open that bag. An apple peeked out at him.
“Okay,” he said. He repeated the process with the bag in the drawer. A rectangular yellow box waited inside, looking very much like the ones his father had used in the darkroom. He picked this up and rattled it.
Shoving himself back from the desk with one elbow, he slid from the chair to the floor and then under his desk. There was really no chance that this box held unprocessed photo paper, not after al these years. Still, there was no knowing what his mother might keep stashed. Under his desk, he’d have a LITTLE darkness, in case this really was unexposed print paper.
He eased the lid open. Photo paper, yes, but used: somebody’s collection of pictures. No doubt his mother had been showing some ancient souvenirs to her fans. Matt slid out from under the desk and opened the box completely.
A glossy five by seven of a human skull grinned up at him.
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