Until she spoke, she didn’t have the faintest notion of how to make a quick search for a book not in the computerized index. Then, as the words came out, she did.
She sat down at the console. It used a virtual keyboard and light pen, familiar and adequate input devices if not the system Adele preferred. She called up the index by stack, then switched to graphical display and sorted each stack by number in groups of ten. By the time the first stack had run—ending in a group of seven titles, indexed from one to seven in sequence—she’d programmed the console to scroll through the remainder of the collection in order, allowing five seconds for each stack.
“Ma’am?” Hogg said. He sounded frightened, but he’d stepped away from the Prior and closed his knife again. Adele could see him from the corners of her eyes, but she kept her focus on the display.
“Give me five minutes, Hogg,” Adele said. She understood how the servant felt, angry and desperate for something to do; ideally something that would help Daniel, but anyway something. “Maybe ten. You wouldn’t learn anything faster than that your way, nothing you could be certain of.”
Hogg grunted, but he didn’t openly object. Two spacers held the Prior’s arms; another stood with the muzzle of his impeller in the face of the girl still unconscious and drooling on the floor.
Rows of equal columns scrolled, paused, and vanished for the next stackful. Adele did believe in her way over Hogg’s; but she knew Hogg’s would work. The Prior—old and frail—might die before pain drove the words out, but there were plenty of younger, stronger acolytes. One of them would talk.
But Daniel wouldn’t have wanted that. Oh, he’d have used torture if the safety of the Republic or his crew depended on it, but it would bother him; and it would bother him worse to know that an old man had died for him, that a pretty girl was now blind because for Daniel’s sake battery acid had been dripped into her eyes.
Adele smiled faintly. If her method failed and she turned the business over to Hogg, she’d lie to Daniel about what had happened. That’d be easy enough; and what were a few eyeless faces to Adele Mundy, whose dreams already had so many visitors whom her shots had mutilated?
“I knew we could count on you, ma’am,” Hogg said, his voice calm again. “You’d never let the young master down.”
He must have misinterpreted my smile, Adele thought. Then she thought, Or perhaps he didn’t.
With that realization came the break, the rows of titles with one column shorter by a tenth than the rest. Adele froze the display, then said, “Stack Eighty-Seven, Title Forty . . . Two. Between Pre-Hiatus Serials Catalogued at Las Primas Base, and A History of My Times, by Vice-Admiral Beverly Coyne.”
Hilbride, his sub-machine gun forgotten on a pile of culled volumes, started into the stacks. Woetjans would’ve joined him. If the bosun went, half the scores of Sissies in the chamber would’ve followed. Adele ordered, “Leave him be! Hilbride will get it.”
All this needed was half a dozen semi-literates shredding the book in their struggle to be the one who brought it to her. . . .
To give the others something to occupy them, and partly because she was human and proud of what she’d accomplished, Adele went on conversationally, “We saw no books elsewhere in the monastery. Anything we did find would stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore the best place to hide a book is here in the library, a needle among a hundred thirty thousand other needles . . . but left out of the index.”
She grinned with pride and satisfaction; Hilbride was coming back with a fat quarto volume held in both hands. “So I searched for a hole in the index. And found one.”
“Here, mistress!” Hilbride said, handing Adele the book with the pride of a cat presenting its owner with a dead mouse. “What do we do now?”
Adele opened the volume with the care it deserved. It was covered with the same translucent vellum that had been used to rebind many of the other books in the collection. In this case the binding was probably original, and the work itself was a manuscript indited in a clear, bold hand that managed to be graceful without becoming ornate. She opened it, starting a quarter in from the back.