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He glanced at the display. He d been asleep for maybe an hour, but the wall
was still live. Line after line of text ran across it. He had to pin down the
words before he lost them.
Search. Sitra Akhar.
A couple of moments passed, words blurring into moving lines, and then a
highlighted passage: Sitra Akhar, refers to the left hand path of the tree. It
also refers to those things associated with darkness and corruption. The
left-hand side of the tree. Why? He called up the chart again. William
Warburg. That much was clear. Francis Gleeson? Darkness and corruption? He
didn t think so. Joshua Van der Stegen was on the wrong side. Van der Stegen
was on the right. And Pinpin Dan and the rest were in the center. Maybe he had
the connections wrong. Perhaps the names were in the wrong places. It was
worth considering. But he had no way to connect them any other way. He had to
find the link. The White-HairedMan. The pair from Pinpin s apartment. That was
where the clues lay. Then he could join the missing lines.
Just for a second he thought he d try something. Connect all. A tracery of
lines sprang up between the various ovals. It was strangely reminiscent of the
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kabala diagram the tree of life. No, too many lines there, too many circles,
but there were similarities.
He needed coffee. He cleared down the chart to its original form and shut
down the display. He needed to work on it more. Threads, circles, lines he
wasn t dealing with possibilities; he was dealing with geometries and
mathematics now, and if he didn t watch out he d become ensnared in an
artificial pattern of his own making. He had no grounding in this material at
all.
Coffee was better. It would help him think straight. He was almost feeling
well enough to venture out again, and the dreamDaman had been right. What had
he been waiting for? He had to find Billie, and find her soon.
He finished the coffee and had another. He needed the kick-start. He was
already wearing too many patches, what with the Rapiheals and the painkillers.
He didn t want to overdo it. As he stood there sipping, leaning back against
the kitchen units, he had another thought. Sure, Billie was a priority, but he
was supposed to be working on the Outreach stuff. He d almost completely
forgotten what had started it all. Almost. And if Billie was tied in, as he
suspected, then solving the Outreach problem was partway along the path to
determining Billie s location.
If he were going to get any sense out of this stuff, he had to talk to
someone, but whom? He could hardly approach anyone else from Outreach. Not
having Billie around was more difficult than he thought. He could have used
her as a sounding board. Sometimes if he had only himself to bounce things
off, the echoes became too distorted. He could wallow in the network for days
without making any headway. There had to be a more sensible means of finding
what he needed. Okay, all this stuff was freely available to the Locality s
populace, but somebody had to maintain it. He called up the wall screen again.
Services, he said.
A Locality site map faded into view, series of colored icons denoting the
various facilities. Tiny wording appeared beside each, explaining what the
graphics meant. He peered closer at the screen.
Information services, he said.
A pink icon unfolded into a list, and he scanned the options. There. Library.
Give me a map of where the library is.
It was about halfway up New, right next to one of the exterior walls. It was
a shuttle ride and then a walk, about seven blocks west of the transit. The
exercise would do him good.
First a shower and a shave. Try to recapture some shred of normality, at
least pretend he was something resembling human. As he moved to the bathroom,
he took a good whiff of his shirt. He stank. Humanity was long overdue.
He stood on the opposite side of the road from the library building. The only
thing distinguishing it from its companions was the lack of logos or
advertising crawling up the walls. Apart from that, it was new glass/metal, if
perhaps a little more squat than the surrounding offices. There weren t many
people around. Jack smoothed his hair, still slightly damp from the shower,
and took a breath. Okay, nothing for it. He headed across the street.
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He climbed the stairs and stood before two large glass doors. Inside there
was a blank lobby, marble-effect floors and walls, but nothing else. There was
no reception, no lobby furniture, merely a single double door on the other
side. He pushed through the glass doors and crossed the empty floor, his
footsteps echoing off the flat, shiny walls, floor, and ceiling. Strange. He
stood for a couple of seconds outside the double doors, wondering whether he
should knock. There seemed little point, so he pushed against the right-most
door, half expecting it to be locked. It wasn t, and it swung effortlessly
inward, no sound apart from the sudden increase in volume of some sort of
underlying ambient hum. Jack stepped inside.
The hum was louder here, and there was the smell of . . . he couldn t quite
put his finger on it. It was sort of like machinery, but different, with a
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