"The outer area is for pleasant conversation and quiet dining," the Innkeeper told Ethan. "With the door shut, this room’s soundproofing insures that any behavior, even the most robust, can be kept private. We will arrange immediately for a separate exit and an elevator directly up to your quarters."

"Hey, nobody got hurt. Scaring those guys is harder than you think," Ethan said. He smiled winningly at the Innkeeper.

The Innkeeper rapped his staff on the floor. Ethan stopped smiling.

"I like my quiet dining room quiet."

"Yessir."

"Enjoy your meal," the Innkeeper said, and left.

"And even if I did scare them, it wouldn’t do them any harm at all," Ethan muttered.

***

Chasen, loitering casually near the door to the private dining room, walked off as the Innkeeper came out. Glancing back, Chasen saw him close the door and erase it with a smooth gesture of one hand. Well, he thought, it was possible that Ethan was sealed in permanently, but it was much more likely that he and his relatives were just shunted out of the more civilized areas. Chasen sighed. Over the years, he had come to appreciate civilization; not that simplicity didn’t have its virtues, too. On the other hand, here at the Inn, even if he wore armor and carried a shield, he could still get a vodka martini. Chasen used the restaurant’s back exit and walked around the perimeter, looking for changes, especially a new door.

***

"Speech!"

"Yeah!"

"All right!" Ethan said, looking at the TelePrompTer. The cuneiform symbols started to flow slowly up the screen. "The time is ours! It is time for us to accompish our fated hero task. Slow this thing down, can you? We are all returned to our home to retake our rightful place in the world. To this end…what? So we can do this," Ethan ad-libbed, "we’ve made some changes—some of us are scribes and some of us are priests. Usually we’re all heroes and hunters, but we’ve gotten started a little late and we have to catch up…uh…we need a variety of talents. The scribes, the priests and the hunters will locate and acqu…the scribes and the priests will find out what we need and the hunters will go get it. Once we have what we need, we’ll change the world back the way it was, we’ll be a new broom…what? We don’t sweep—that’s for slaves and women."

Produs Singleton whispered to Ranon Singleton: "I thought you were going to rehearse him?"

"We did."

Stap Singleton whispered to Ethan: "We will redirect the world into the proper and traditional worship…"

"Oh. Uh, we’ll redirect the world to the proper…Oh, you know what I mean—we’ll bless the fields, drink the beer and hunt, just like we used to!"

"Do you think we should remind him how different the world will be when we succeed?" Ranon asked while the rest of the clan cheered.

"He’ll just forget again. He’s quite the optimist," Produs replied.

***

"Did I mention I have a 3:00 patrol?" Martin asked. "I should be back at the Lounge by 2:30."

Ann nodded. "If you want to walk, we should leave now; or we could have coffee on the roof. I can port us from there."

"That sounds good. You can’t teleport from here?"

"No, apportation is permitted only from the lobby and roof. I had to down to the lobby when I left to check my board. There’s an elevator over this way. Usually," she added looking around. "Ah, there it is."

The doors opened, they entered, the doors closed. Martin looked for a control panel but did see one.

"The roof," Ann said.

The car remained still.

After a moment, Ann said, "Martin? Have you changed your mind about coffee?"

"No. Why?"

"The elevators here are attuned to the passengers," Ann said. "I asked for the roof. Apparently you want to go somewhere else?"

"Oh," Martin said. "Not exactly. I was just thinking that this is the first time this evening we’ve been private."

"Think about coffee," Ann said.

"I’d rather think about kissing you."

"I can’t apport us out of here," Ann said reminded him mildly.

"You could kiss me, and then I might feel more like coffee."

"I’ll kiss you when this elevator arrives on the roof."

Whoosh.

"OK," Martin said. "Now, I didn’t do that."

Ann laughed. She stepped out of the elevator before she turned to him.

"You don’t trust the elevator?"

"No," Ann said. "It seems a little too anxious to please. We might find ourselves elsewhere."

"That’s not a totally unacceptable idea," Martin said.

Ann smiled, but said, "Returning might be a problem."

As Ann left the No Mirrors Lounge and went down the outside stairs, she shifted her Vionnet dress to jeans and a sweater. She set off on foot for her house on Russian Hill. She had checked her assignment board at midnight and found it clear. She would have to check it again at noon, but that was hours off. She had time to walk and think.

She had something, actually several things, to think about, to wit: Ethan and his forty closest friends. She had told Martin that he was not a problem, which was true at the moment. If it had not been for her meeting with the number forty-one last year, she would have dismissed Ethan and his kin as an example of an amusing quirk.

She climbed the steps to the front door, then turned to go into the kitchen. Taking a glass and a bottle of wine, she went up three more flights to her bedroom and went out to the long, angled north deck. She turned one of the chairs and faced it away from the table. She heard the bats as they skimmed the surface of the hidden lake between the reservoir and the base of the hill. Putting her feet up on the rail, she looked out. The view to the north showed a few lights on Alcatraz, with Angel Island behind it. The western aspect showed the Golden Gate Bridge carrying faintly glowing streams of light from the hurrying traffic and Mount Tamalpais as a looming darkness off to the north-west.

There were physical laws that governed the universe. The physical laws were changeable. Human physics had advanced to the stage where theoreticians saw that clearly. The physicists knew that the physical laws described the material universe but knew of no way to change the laws. Ann knew that the physical laws, and therefore the physical universe, flowed out of the intentions of the forty-one beings who held a part of the cosmic egg when the universe was formed.

Forty-one was a number that could be attached to many things, however, and was not applicable to the tianyuan—the heavenly elements—alone. Without straining, Ann remembered all 41 Flavors of Ice Cream and the complete text of a recent article entitled 41 Ways to Prune Aka-Matsu.

Ethan had always felt most comfortable among his own clan. In that respect he was very much a herd animal, not unlike Japanese or English tourists, who travel in packs. If he had decided to spend some time here, it was natural for him to come accompanied by his relatives. Forty of them, with Ethan making forty-one. Possibly only a coincidence.

About a year ago, the Getty Center had been robbed by an auburn-haired vampire and his gang. Some friends of hers had been involved in preventing the casualty list from including all the museum attendees. After one of her friends had asked for help, she had joined in their last confrontation with the robbers. One of the pieces of loot not recovered by the museum was one of the forty-one keys to destroying and remaking the universe.

She had not forgotten about Adan, the heavy handed museum robber, and his little list—which included at least two of the heavenly elements, if she was right about what that thunderstrike actually was—she simply had not been in a hurry to pursue him. She intended to go after the elephantine vampire soon, in about thirteen or twenty years. When one was an immortal, especially one as old as she was, one had a view of ‘soon’ that was slightly different than, say, that of an average human, and in any case, there was no hurry: Remaking the world was an event that happened only after long preparation.

Even separated, the pieces of the cosmic egg were powerful. Each had a gift, which, within the current laws of the universe, would enhance the life of the holder, one way or another. The gifts were all different and were not always obvious. If one had an element in the shape of a almost square table-cut ruby, taking a hypothetical example not completely at random, and if one had put it through a private door into an isolated spatio-temporal pocket almost as soon as it came into one’s possession, again thinking hypothetically, one would not have had an opportunity to examine it carefully enough to discover how its simple powers manifested themselves.

On the other hand, the tianyuan had been around since the beginning of this universe. During that period, most of them had been in human—not necessarily Earth human, but human just the same—hands for varying lengths of time. Admittedly, some humans were more observant than others, but given enough time, the properties of many of the elements were noted and described.

At first, the holder of an element, when she chose to pass it on to another, would tell the new possessor what the element’s gift was. Eventually, word of mouth was supplemented by the written word.

It was after mankind learned the skill of writing that the real and ascribed lore of the tianyuan had accumulated rapidly. Ann had not read everything written about them, although it was beginning to look as if she should. She did know enough about them not to be surprised at any of their attributed powers. A few of her friends, both vampires and vampire hunters, had told her of a charmed ring that made a vampire invulnerable to sunlight, crosses and staking. A vampire who felt insecure—and Adan obviously did, to the point of trying to become a shape shifter, although that was another story—might know of a piece of the egg that would protect him. Possibly Adan was motivated only by limited and direct self-interest.

Possibly there was nothing in either Adan’s or Ethan’s actions that should incite her interest, but she doubted it. She had learned to trust her doubts.

As the sky in the east paled, she stood up. If the world was currently in play, she needed to know more.

Dr. Meredith Jerome was the Chief Librarian of a small private college east of Moraga. She lived on the north side of campus, where students had never managed to infiltrate, within easy walking distance of the main library.

The campus had lots of the traditional greenswards. It had been laid out when both water and land were easier to obtain and no one worried about the many problems caused by irrigation in a dry, hot climate. In recent years, the lawns were smaller, mostly on the north and east sides of hills and buildings, and laid out over porous drip tubes and subterranean cisterns that took advantage of the rainy season.

On the whole, she thought, this had been a good life. She now appeared to be in her early sixties, and soon, as immortals measure time, she would be changing her life and probably her career. Librarian had been interesting, but it might be time for a change. Perhaps she would be an historian next, perhaps something else; on the other hand, there were new developments in data management not yet complete…

The college library dated from the last century, with floating stainless steel staircases and stabilized cork floors. Meredith passed through the lobby and the main reading room, entering an unlabeled door in the stacks and climbed the stairs to the third floor. She entered her office through the Chief Librarian’s private door.

"Good morning," she said to the woman behind the desk.

"Hi," Ann Grove said. "I brought baklava." She indicated a large pink bakery box on the table by the windows. Beside the box were a coffee pot and cups, small plates and several linen napkins.

"I assume I am to be bribed?"

"You like baklava," Ann said. "You’ve liked baklava since it was invented."

"That’s very true."

"And this place does it really well."

Meredith looked at Ann: This visit, she appeared to be somewhere between twenty-three and thirty, around six feet tall, and had black hair and green eyes. The last time Meri had seen her, in 1887, Ann had been a brunette, too, but with brown eyes, brown skin and was about 5’4". "Well," Meredith said, sitting in one of the chairs by the table, "what do you want to know?"

"Where do I find facts about the Cosmic Egg?" Ann asked, pouring coffee.

"Ask your ward."

"He knows what I know: There are forty-one pieces of the Cosmic Egg and some of them are on Earth."

"Probably most of them, by now." Meredith sipped her coffee, put down her cup and eyed the baklava.

"‘By now?’" Ann repeated, making it a question.

"According to History of the Matrix of Earth," Meri said, "the pieces of the Egg tend to cluster, under the right circumstances."

"Why here?"

"Hypothetically, Earth is the locus for the next assembly," Meredith said, taking a piece of baklava. "I believe it will be possible sometime within the next century."

"Oh," Ann said, very mildly. "Really?"

Clearly, Meri thought, Ann was surprised.

"Is that in History of the Matrix of Earth, too?" Ann asked.

"No, that’s in The Story of the Cackler.

"Where can I find a copy?"

"You can find a précis in almost any good encyclopedia of world myth."

"That would be a last resort," Ann said. "Where can I find the complete text?"

"The original was carved on a wall of a small temple along the Nile, now entirely covered by a very large temple, dedicated to a different god. History of the Matrix of Earth was originally painted in a cave now under water."

"Ah."

"Now, there are transcriptions, transliterations, translations, and now of course, photo-copies. What languages do you read?"

"I am reasonably literate," Ann said.

"Good, that makes things easier." Meredith wiped her hands and went to her computer. "Let me see. I think there is a copy of History of the Matrix of Earth, in Old Mongolian, at the Asian Art Museum, across the Bay. You may have some trouble accessing it, since the Museum is in flux. They’re changing buildings, and this year and the next, most items will be in storage. Oh, never mind, the book seems to have moved already."

"I beg your pardon? The books are openly autonomous?"

"Not the way you may mean," Meredith chuckled. It wasn’t often she could startle Ann and she’d managed to do it twice this morning. "According to this footnote to the catalogue, there was a sale, and the copy of History of the Matrix of Earth was de-acquired, to use a current neologism. Let me find the current edition of Buy and Brag."

"What’s that?"

"It’s actually called Acquisitions and it’s published by a consortium of museums and libraries, here and abroad. It’s a combination boast—see what I have and you don’t—want list and a sort of Antiques Roadshow identification column. You can sort according to a variety of data—date written, date sold or traded, language, variant texts, price, subject, who sold, who bought. There are separate lists of what’s for sale and what’s wanted." Meri frowned at the screen for a moment, then turned to Ann: "You don’t really need the actual item, do you? You just want the data."

"Yes."

"Facsimiles will do then, or transliterations. What name are you using? Have you a credit card number? Mailing address? Web address? Fine. Then let me see what’s on offer. I’ll check the Ancient Text Society web site, the Huntington Library, the British Library, the Smithsonian Library, University of the Andes, the British Museum, the Louvre, Mexico City, Cairo, Beijing, Taipei…" Happily, Meredith clicked away at her keyboard.

Ann Grove smiled at the librarian and sipped her coffee.

Meri printed out a list and handed it to Ann: "Ah, that was fun. Now, I’m not sure what the fact to page ratio is, but these will get you started."

Ann eyed the four single spaced pages. "It seems so," she agreed.

"Some of these are coming express, others will trickle in. There were more books than I thought there would be. I would say it’s not just the pieces of the Egg that tend to cluster."

"Oh?" Ann asked, a trifle blankly, as if she were beyond surprise.

"Some of these are new, newly discovered, I mean. Interesting."

"Spontaneous generation in the depths of the stacks," Ann murmured.

"Very possibly," Meri agreed.

"I saw Etana last night," Ann said. "Do people interested in the Egg cluster?"

"I don’t see why not," Meri said. "I also bought some forthcoming publications, to be delivered later." She returned to the baklava and coffee. After a quick restorative nibble, she said, "I wouldn’t suggest this to a human, but the ones on that last page, those you’ll have to steal. The organizations that hold the originals won’t hear of copying them. It’s out of scheduled order or some other, even less rational, reason."

"Fine," Ann said. "I’ll put back anything I take."

"And if you call these people, they are skilled at making copies; everything from non-intrusive photocopies to stacks of disks to single hard copy printouts." She handed Ann a business card.

"Gorilla Data?" Ann read.

"They say they were inspired by the Huntington Library’s publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls."

"Cupertino. Are they humans?"

"I don’t know, I’ve only e-mailed them," Meri said. "You’re right, this is very good baklava."

***

Continue with Chapter 2c