“The Prior said that, mistress,” Margarida said. “He may be right, but during my year in the Service I’ve wandered quite some distance in the Tree, farther than most acolytes do. I haven’t seen individual hermits. Though they may have been hiding from me.”
She offered a cautious smile. “The Prior is very old,” she said. “Sometimes I think he remembers things from when he was young better than he does more recent events.”
“I see,” Adele said. She didn’t trust the girl, but she was uncomfortably aware that her opinion might have been swayed by the fact that the novice had seemed to find Daniel attractive. “You may go back to your duties. Thank you for your help.”
Margarida offered a bow, then picked up her broom and resumed cleaning. Several spacers glowered at her with expressions suggesting that they’d like to burn her alive. That wouldn’t bring Daniel back, but it’d be a way of letting out frustration.
Adele returned to her display. She knew Woetjans was waiting for orders, but she had nothing to offer at the moment.
Adele had found seventeen maps in the monastery’s database; she’d relayed them to the spacers making the physical search for Daniel. One of the maps, drawn a hundred and fifty standard years previous, purported to show all human habitations, past or present, within the Tree.
Woetjans’ team had been searching the most distant, a warren burrowed into the northern edge of the Tree by a religious order not long after the Hiatus. The group only survived a generation or so, in contrast to the Service which the oracle had supported well into its third millennium by now.
None of the searches had found any sign of Daniel; and for the moment, Adele had run out of new places to look.
“Mistress?” prodded Woetjans in a desperate voice. “What do we do? He can’t just have vanished into thin air.”
“The books, the hardcopy here . . . ,” Adele said, splaying the fingers of her left hand toward the extensive stack area. “Some of them contain descriptions of the Tree. I’m searching them in hope that there’ll be something that isn’t in the electronic files.”
She paused and rubbed her eyes. “Nothing in the database is pre-Hiatus,” she said, “though some of it is very old. Perhaps the books will tell me something, but I haven’t found it yet.”
Volumes she’d plucked from the stacks littered the floor beside and behind her. She hadn’t bothered to reshelve them; the acolytes could do that after the Princess Cecile lifted from New Delphi. There were a hundred and thirty thousand books in the collection, according to the index. Most could easily be eliminated, but even so Adele had barely scratched the surface of the volumes that might possibly help.
Hilbride, one of the spacers who’d arrived with Woetjans, squatted for a closer look at the books Adele had gathered. He seemed to feel a personal involvement in Daniel’s disappearance because he’d been one of the last people to talk with him when he left the ship.
“Mistress?” he said. Adele had always found him one of the more literate Sissies. “How do you tell what books are where? They’re not shelved in any order that I can see.”
“No,” Adele agreed, “only by height and thickness. But they’re indexed—”
She gestured to the console she was using.
“—here, with the location.” She focused on the next title her search program had highlighted. “The Adventures of Captain Devereaux,” she quoted. ” ‘An account of forty years of voyages as spacer and captain. Printed on Arslan in the tenth year of the third indiction of President Bella Gruen.’ ”
She closed her eyes for a moment to bring information into high mental relief. “That’d be roughly twenty-seven hundred years ago. According to the database, Devereaux once touched on New Delphi. Perhaps he’ll say something interesting in his book, which is item thirty-one on the uppermost shelf of stack three-fourteen.”
Adele grinned wryly at Hilbride. “If you’ll go fetch it, we’ll learn.”
Hilbride glanced at a stack to see where the numbers were—at the top on either end—and started off, holding his sub-machine gun in both hands instead of carrying it slung. Woetjans looked even angrier than she had been. It struck Adele that if she’d given the bosun the command she gave Hilbride, Woetjans would have needed help to execute it.