M. Tynar had stopped by his EMV, and now he laid his hand on the palmlock on the driver’s side. Doors lifted and accordioned inward.

I lowered myself into the sandalwood-and-leather smell of the passenger cell; Tynar’s car smelled like the archives, like Tynar himself, I realized, as the archivist reclined in the driver’s seat next to me.

“I don’t really know if it’s been invaded,” he said, sealing the doors and activating the vehicle with a touch and command. Under the sandalwood-and-leather scent, the cockpit had that new-car smell of fresh polymers and ozone, lubricants and energy which had seduced mankind for almost a millennium. “It’s so hard to access properly today,” he continued, “the datasphere is more overloaded than I’ve ever seen it. This afternoon I actually had to wait for a query on Robinson Jeffers!”

We lifted out and over the canal, right over a public square much like the one where I’d almost been killed earlier this day, and leveled off on a lower flyway three hundred meters above the rooftops. The city was pretty at night: most of the ancient buildings were outlined in old-fashioned glowstrips, and there were more street lamps than advertising holos. But I could see crowds surging in side streets, and there were Renaissance SDF military vehicles hovering over the main avenues and terminex squares. Tynar’s EMV was queried twice for ID, once by local traffic control and again by a human, FORCE-confident voice.

We flew on.

“The archives doesn’t have a farcaster?” I said, looking off in the distance to where fires seemed to be burning.

“No. There was no need. We have few visitors, and the scholars who do come do not mind the walk of a few blocks.”

“Where’s the private farcaster that you think I might be able to use?”

“Here,” said the archivist. We dropped out of the flyway and circled a low building, no more than thirty stories, and settled onto an extruded landing flange just where the Glennon-Height Period Deco flanges grew out of stone and plasteel. “My order keeps its residence here,” he said. “I belong to a forgotten branch of Christianity called Catholicism.” He looked embarrassed. “But you are a scholar, M. Severn. You must know of our Church from the old days.”

“I know of it from more than books,” I said. “Is there an order of priests here?”

Tynar smiled. “Hardly priests, M. Severn. There are eight of us in the lay order of Historical and Literary Brethren. Five serve at the Reichs University. Two are art historians, working on the restoration of Lutzchendorf Abbey. I maintain the literary archives. The Church has found it cheaper to allow us to live here than to commute daily from Pacem.”

We entered the apartment hive—old even by Old Web standards: retrofitted lighting in corridors of real stone, hinged doors, a building that did not even challenge or welcome us as we entered. On an impulse, I said, “I’d like to ’cast to Pacem.”

The archivist looked surprised. “Tonight? This moment?”

“Why not?”

He shook his head. I realized that to this man, the hundred-mark farcaster fee would represent several weeks’ pay.

“Our building has its own portal,” he said. “This way.”

The central staircase was faded stone and corroded wrought iron with a sixty-meter drop in the center. From somewhere down a darkened corridor came the wail of an infant, followed by a man’s shouting and a woman’s crying.

“How long have you lived here, M. Tynar?”

“Seventeen local years, M. Severn. Ah… thirty-two standard, I believe. Here it is.”

The farcaster portal was as ancient as the building, its translation frame surrounded by gilded bas-relief gone green and gray.

“There are Web restrictions on travel tonight,” he said. “Pacem should be accessible. Some two hundred hours remain before the barbarians… whatever they’re called… are scheduled to reach there. Twice the time left to Renaissance Vector.” He reached out and grasped my wrist. I could feel his tension as a slight vibration through tendon and bone. “M. Severn… do you think they will burn my archives? Would even they destroy ten thousand years of thought?” His hand dropped away.

I was not sure who the “they” were—Ousters? Shrike Cult saboteurs? Rioters? Gladstone and the Hegemony leaders were willing to sacrifice these “first-wave” worlds. “No,” I said, extending my hand to shake his. “I don’t believe they’ll allow the archives to be destroyed.”

M. Ewdrad B. Tynar smiled and stood back a step, embarrassed at showing emotion. He shook hands. “Good luck, M. Severn. Wherever your travels take you.”

“God bless you, M. Tynar.” I had never used that phrase before, and it shocked me that I had spoken it now. I looked down, fumbled out Gladstone’s override card, and tapped the three-digit code for Pacem.

The portal apologized, said that it was not possible at the moment, finally got it through its microcephalic processors that this was an override card, and hummed into existence.

I nodded at Tynar and stepped through, half expecting that I was making a serious mistake not going straight home to TC².

It was night on Pacem, much darker than Renaissance Vector’s urban glow, and it was raining to boot. Raining hard with that fist-on-metal pounding violence that makes one want to curl up under thick blankets and wait for morning.

The portal was under cover in some half-roofed courtyard but outside enough for me to feel the night, the rain, and the cold. Especially the cold. Pacem’s air was half as thick as Web standard, its single habitable plateau twice as high as Renaissance V’s sea-level cities. I would have turned back then rather than step into that night and downpour, but a FORCE Marine stepped out of the shadows, multipurpose assault rifle slung but ready to swivel, and asked me for my ID.

I let him scan the card, and he snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”

“Is this the New Vatican?”

“Yes, sir.”

I caught a glimpse of illuminated dome through the downpour. I pointed over the courtyard wall. “Is that St. Peter’s?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would Monsignor Edouard be found there?”

“Across this courtyard, left at the plaza, the low building to the left of the cathedral, sir!”

“Thank you, Corporal.”

“It’s Private, sir!”

I pulled my short cape around me, ceremonial and quite useless against such a rain as it was, and ran across the courtyard.

A human… perhaps a priest, although he wore no robe or clerical collar… opened the door to the residential hall. Another human behind a wooden desk told me that Monsignor Edouard was in residence and was awake, despite the late hour. Did I have an appointment?

No, I did not have an appointment but wished to speak to the Monsignor.

It was important.

On what topic? the man behind the desk politely but firmly asked.

He had not been impressed by my override card. I suspected that I was speaking to a bishop.

On the topic of Father Paul Duré and Father Lenar Hoyt, I told him.

The gentleman nodded, whispered into a bead mike so small that I had not noticed it on his collar, and led me into the residential hall.

This place made the old tower that M. Tynar lived in look like a sybarite’s palace. The corridor was absolutely featureless except for the rough plaster walls and even rougher wooden doors. One of the doors was open, and as we passed, I glimpsed a chamber more prison cell than sleeping room: low cot, rough blanket, wooden kneeling stool, an unadorned dresser holding a pitcher of water and simple basin; no windows, no media walls, no holo pit, no data access deck. I suspected the room wasn’t even interactive.

From somewhere there echoed voices rising in a chanting/singing so elegant and atavistic that it made the hair on my neck tingle. Gregorian. We passed through a large eating area as simple as the cells had been, through a kitchen that would have been familiar to cooks in John Keats’s day, down a worn stone staircase, through an ill-lighted corridor, and up another, narrower staircase. The other man left me, and I stepped into one of the most beautiful spaces I had ever seen.