Laughter boomed in the hallway. Adele sidled another step away from the door and put her straight back against the wall. The band of tile at neck level felt cool and helped keep her calm. Bracey, one of her assistants, entered with two other men whom Adele didn’t recognize.
That didn’t mean they weren’t library assistants: the positions had been granted as political favors to relatives who needed jobs. The only blessing was that most of them, lazy scuts with neither ability nor interest in library work, didn’t bother to show up. Those who did pilfered and damaged materials through careless disregard.
Bracey, a Zojira collateral, was one of those who often came to the library. Unfortunately.
The trio entered the room, passing a bottle among them. From the smell of their breath as they strode past Adele she was surprised they were still able to move, let alone climb the lovely helical staircase to the third floor.
Three other assistants were in the library. Two were fondling one another in a corner. Their lives were at risk if in passion they managed to dislodge the boxes stacked to either side. The third assistant was Vanness, who was actually trying to organize a crate of what were probably logbooks. Alone of her “assistants,” Vanness had the interest that was a necessary precondition to becoming useful. The Kostroman wasn’t any real help now, but Adele could cure his ignorance if she just got some room to work in.
“Hey, save me seconds!” Bracey called to the couple in the corner. Adele’s presence hadn’t concerned them, but now they sprang apart.
One of Bracey’s companions tugged his arm, nodding toward Adele behind them. Bracey waved the bottle to her and said, “Hey, chiefie! Want a drink?”
Bracey burped loudly; his companions lapsed into giggles. Adele looked through the Kostroman as if he didn’t exist, then walked to the data console she’d spent most of the past two weeks getting in order because that was within her capacity to achieve without the help of anyone else . . . and she didn’t have the help of anyone else.
The console was of high-quality Cinnabar manufacture and so new that it was still crated in the vestibule of the palace when Walter’s supporters took stock after the coup. It came loaded with a broad-ranging database which could, now that Adele had completed her labors, access information from any of the computers in the government network; better and faster than the computers could reach their own data, in most cases.
Adele rested her forehead against the console’s smooth coolness and wondered whether starving on Bryce would have been a better idea than accepting the Kostroman offer. But it had seemed so wonderful at the time. She’d even told Mistress Boileau, “It’s too good to be true!”
Adele smiled. At least in hindsight she could credit herself with a flawlessly accurate analysis.
Adele was a Mundy of Chatsworth, one of Cinnabar’s most politically powerful families while she was growing up, though the Mundys’ populist tendencies meant they were generally on the outs with their fellow magnates. Adele hadn’t been interested in politics. When she was sixteen she’d left Xenos for the Bryce Academy. Her choice was made as much to avoid the alarms and street protests escalating into riots as for the opportunity to study the premier collections of the human galaxy under Mistress Boileau.
That was fifteen terrestrial years ago. Three days after Adele Mundy reached Bryce, the Speaker of the Cinnabar Senate announced that he’d uncovered an Alliance plot to overthrow the government of Cinnabar through native agents—primarily members of the Mundy family. The Senate proscribed the traitors. Their property was confiscated by the state or turned over to those who informed against them, and those proscribed were hunted down under emergency regulations that were a license to kill.
Adele had a bank account on Bryce, but it was intended to provide her first quarter’s allowance rather than an inheritance. Mistress Boileau herself replaced the support which had vanished with the Mundys of Chatsworth. Her charity was partly from kindness, because the old scholar’s heart was as gentle as a lamb’s on any subject outside her specialty: the collection and organization of knowledge.