The clerk gave him a sympathetic look, raised his eyebrows almost into his hairline, fluttered his eyelashes and his hands, all preparatory to glancing over his shoulder and skulking into the shadows between two stacks of books. From this refuge he summoned Aufors with a beckoning finger.
“My supervisor’s another one like that! Don’t do this and don’t do that! He keeps his brains inside his hat, behind the brim, the hell with him the sprat!”
“You don’t like him?” asked Aufors, wondering whether the man had gone mad on the job or been hired because he was mad enough for the job. There were jobs where madness was an asset. The military was full of them.
“I ask for my vacation, oh, first he says go then he says no. No leave, go grieve. I hate him.” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and counted audibly from one to twenty-five. Then he opened his eyes and said in a quiet voice, “If you promise not to spill the beans, I’ll let you look at the machines.”
“Machines?” said Aufors, blankly. He had expected machines no more than madmen.
The functionary smiled bleakly. “Off-world archive machines, Colonel.”
“I didn’t know we had off-world things . . .”
“When Lord Paramount says not, the things in storage, he’s forgot! But no forbidden off-world thing is forbidden to a king!”
“Do you make those rhymes up as you go along, or have you got them all memorized?” asked Aufors.
“A game,” said the functionary, flushing. “Sometimes we … we archivists play it together. Because we’re bored.”
“For the moment, could we not play? You mentioned machines?”
“All kinds,” said the man sullenly. “Not only medical stuff, but weapons and heavy-duty lifters. Can’t say I disagree with having archive machines. Notes one takes and words one jots, but vellum breaks and paper rots. In machines we save the past for that’s the only place they last!”
“You can’t stop doing it, can you? What’s your name?”
The strange one glanced over his shoulder, making a face, obviously thinking of the superior aforementioned. “Jeorfy. Jeorfy Bottoms. As for the versifying, well, it gets to be a habit. It’s hard to talk like a human being when one hasn’t been treated like one for years! Come along. Since everyone on Haven is supposed to be half-witted, the machines have been simplified. No offense, Colonel, but I could teach a pig how to use them in five minutes.”
The clerk led Aufors down a twisty aisle into a half-hidden cubby equipped with chair, desk, and the same kind of keyboard most literate Havenites were taught in school to use for things like bills of sale, deeds to land, contracts or marriage agreements, that is, all matters needing clarity and permanent storage. Aufors’s family used such a device for breeding records, and after the clerk had explained the common usages of the mechanisms and led Aufors through the process, Aufors had no trouble imitating a man deeply interested in three-hundred-year-old squabbles between Langmarsh and Dania.
As soon as the doggerel-body was out of sight and hearing, however, Aufors left the screen busy with its noisy reenactment of the battle for Wellsport while he cleared the screen and entered the words “Yugh Delganor.”
“Heir presumptive to the Lord Paramount, son of the Lord Paramount’s slightly younger twin brother, Elwin,” the screen informed him, going on with a lengthy list of diplomatic and fact-finding missions which the heir had handled for Marwell. The earliest date given was only forty years in the past. Aufors tapped his front teeth with a fingernail, musing, and then keyed in the names of some of the events Delganor was said to have been involved in. A diplomatic mission to Frangia, another to Mahahm. A survey of the Drowned Range off Merdune. Accounts of these missions were complete with dates; the oldest of them dated back a hundred sixty years and gave the Prince’s age as thirty. So, he was almost two hundred years old.
Aufors, humming under his breath, entered “Marwell,” and received, “current Lord Paramount of Haven . . .” and it went on with a voluminous account of life and accomplishments, without dates. Again, Aufors tried keying in the names of the events themselves. The old Captain had been right. Some of the events were dated well over two hundred years in the past. So. One could not find dates listed under biographies, possibly because someone had purged them, but no one had purged the accounts of historic events.