III

The Solar System's greatest seat of higher learning sat on the shores of the Sea of Serenity, just north of Tranquillity City.

            It was one of the few places on the moon where you could walk around outside without a spacesuit. Oxbridge Luna was surrounded by an atmosphere dome, made of an energy shield rather than any solid material, so that any meteorites that hit it would pass straight through and the dome would instantly seal up behind them, preventing any atmosphere loss. Large green lawns and trees grew inside the dome on soil shipped up from Earth and several cloned dodos were wandering about on the grass in front of the main library when Mirabi and I arrived, behind the large, floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. A tall, thin, athletic man in a dark blue security guards uniform was waiting for us.

            "Detective Erik Midgard. Chronological Operations Agency," I said as we stepped down from the teleporter pads.

            "Detective Mirabi Arjuna. Likewise," said Mirabi. "Sorry for the wait. You wouldn't believe the day we're having."

            "Captain James Anubis. Terra Cimmeria Security Services, Detectives," said the man, saluting. "I'm in charge of security here at the Project. Thanks for coming. Follow me."

            It was obvious from his accent, and then from his ancient Egyptian pantheonym, that Captain Anubis was a south Martian. But it was only when he saluted and his sleeve cuff slipped back and I saw the start of a line of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs tattooed along his forearm, probably all the way to his elbow, that I knew he was a Free Martian and at least a former professional soldier; a son or grandson of the mercenaries who had almost retaken Titan and Europa from the Jupiter Imperia during the last war. Anubis was in his early thirties, slim and muscular, with close-cropped, almost golden brown hair and blue eyes and he managed to march both briskly and smartly as he led us along the corridor and down two flights of stairs.

            "So what's happened?" asked Mirabi.

            "The project director's been stabbed," said Anubis, glancing at his watchcom. "Forty-five minutes ago as best we can work out. He'd been dead for at least twenty minutes when we found him."

            "OK. Have you moved the body?" I said, as we reached the bottom of the stairs.

            "No, everything's exactly as it was. Through here," said Anubis.

            The double doors at the bottom of the stairs were open, but had a sign next to them, ALTP Project - LLA. Temporal travel in process. Project members only, which explained why we had been called in instead of the Tranquillity police. ChronOps always got sent first to anything that even remotely involved time travel.

            We hurried through the doors into a long rectangular room with a high ceiling. Lots of doorways without doors lead off into other rooms. Each one had a sign above it with a name in artistic calligraphic lettering. Xiangyang Palace. The House of Wisdom. Bibliotheca Corviniana. Nishapur. Glasney College. Alexandria. Each of the rooms we could see through them had walls lined with bookshelves and the shelves were packed. But only some of them were filled with normal paperbacks and hardbacks. Some of the books were much larger or smaller than normal, some of them were scrolls, some of them didn't have spines and many were unusual shapes. One room even had a long shelf of stone and clay tablets with writing scratched onto them in alphabets I didn't know. It would have looked like some kind of museum, except that they were all obviously brand new. I could faintly smell the leather, paper, parchment and other materials coming from all the rooms.

            The main room had been prepared for a party. A long table was set up in middle of the floor, laden with food and drinks, none of which seemed to have been touched. Coloured paper streamers hung from the ceilings and unopened boxes of confetti stood on the corner of the table. Like the rest of the rooms, the main room was also clearly brand new and hadn't finished being decorated yet. Only some of the walls were painted and a small decorating robot with several pressurised paint canisters next to it stood switched off in one corner.

Five people were standing or sitting around the table, surrounded by five more in the same blue security uniforms as Captain Anubis. The five security guards were all carrying Unirifles in their hands, their muzzles low and not pointed at anyone yet. The others were all dressed in casual clothes and the expressions on all ten faces raged from shock, disbelief and grief to suspicion.

            "This is everyone who was here when we found him, Detectives," said Anubis.

            "Oh, thank Darwin. At last," said one of the men in civilian clothes, standing up. "May I ask what's taken so long? I made the call nearly an hour ago."

            "I'm sorry about that, sir," I said. "But you're not the only people with a situation today."

"Yes, we can't be everywhere at once," said Mirabi. "Mister...?"

            "Doctor," said the man. "Doctor Julian Ra." He was slightly shorter than Mirabi, with thick wavy brown hair that hung down to his shoulders and a moustache and beard trimmed to point on his chin. He was dressed in an old fashioned brown suit made of a thick, cross-hatched fabric and he looked almost exactly like a university lecturer was supposed to look in 20th century cartoons. "I'm one of the historians on the Project. This is my colleague, David Zeus, and our teaching assistants Max Ishtar, Isabel Chernobog and Megan Uzume."

            "It's Doctor David Zeus," said the other man, shooting Dr. Julian Ra a sharp look and then smiling broadly just as quickly as he offered Mirabi his hand. "I'm one of the other historians. Pleasure to meet you, Officer...?"

            "Erik Midgard and Mirabi Arjuna," I said. I actually knew who Dr. David Zeus was as I'd seen him numerous times before on TV, presenting documents that tried to make history far more entertaining and exciting than it actually was. But evidently he had to teach at some point. Dr. Zeus was in his early forties, tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, with thick, carefully groomed brown hair, which was probably a result of his television career. "Were all of you here when it happened?"

            "None of us saw it," said Isabel Chernobog. She was in her late teens or early twenties, the latter more likely, with short red hair and dark green eyes. She was shorter than me and her accent was Saturnian. The way she folded her arms and looked me straight in the eye with a slight and unconscious aristocratic sneer was pure Jupiter Nobilita. She would be from a House Chernobog, on one of Saturn's smaller and less important moons. "We were all busy preparing in here."

            "Yes. We didn't hear a thing," said Max Ishtar, shaking his head. "Oh, poor Professor Wei'To."

            Max Ishtar was my height and his accent was from Earth. He was around Chernobog's age and looked very much like a student, with short untidy blond hair and brown eyes.

            "Is that the victim?" I said. "Professor Wei'To?"

            "Yes. Professor Henry Wei'To. He's the head of the project," said Ishtar. "Well... he was."

            "Didn't you even tell them who it was?" said Isabel Chernobog, looking at Ra.

            "Yes, I did," said Dr. Julian Ra. "It was in the message I sent to ChronOps."

            "We were dispatched in a hurry. We didn't have time to read it," I said. I mentally cursed the intruders again, first for stealing my cloning tube, and now for managing to make us look like idiots even after they'd gone. "All right. Who found the Professor?"

            "That... That was me," said Megan Uzume. She was the only one of the teaching assistants who was sitting down and when she looked up, I saw she'd been crying. Megan Uzume was the same age as Ishtar and Chernobog. She had rich, coffee-coloured skin, large brown eyes and long straight black hair that hung down to the middle of her back. I couldn't place her accent straight away, but it sounded central Solar System. "I went to see what was taking him so long and... and..."

            "I was the last person to see him, officers," said Dr. Julian Ra. "Alive. I spoke to him while he was unpacking the latest delivery. He told me he'd finish and follow me and I came in here to help with the party preparations. When he didn't follow me, Megan went to see what was keeping him and then..."

            "We all heard her scream," said Isabel Chernobog.

            "I see," I said. "Any signs of an intruder?"

            "No," said Captain Anubis, shaking his head. "Though I have to admit we haven't been watching for one. We're here to protect the Project members in the past. We didn't know we'd have to worry about something like this in the present."

            "OK," I said. I had several questions already, but we had to get all the facts we could first. "Where is he?"

            Ra led us down the room towards the doorway at the far end. To my slight surprise, Megan Uzume immediately got up and came with us, blinking back her tears. Finding the body had obviously affected her badly, but evidently, she was stronger than she looked.

            The doorway at the end of the room was labelled Yucatan. As Ra led us inside, we saw that — if the rest of the rooms were anything to go by — it was only half finished. The shelves, for two thirds of the way around the room, were empty. The ones that were filled held books made of bundles of what looked like folded paper, but smelt slightly of tree sap. The floor was filled with large plastic packing crates, that the books had presumably arrived in, the ones still waiting to be unpacked standing on the right side and the empty ones on the left.

            Professor Henry Wei'To was lying on his back on the right hand side, next to several unopened boxes. He was a short, plump man in his fifties, well on the way to going bald. What was left of his hair was thin and grey and his face was round and lined. He was dressed in a conservative grey suit and his eyes were closed, but his mouth was half open, frozen in what must have been his last breath.

            The knife was sticking upright out of his chest, where it had been driven between his ribs, almost straight into his heart. The weapon quickly gripped my attention, as it was unusual. The blade was not metal, but seemed to be made out of some kind of very rough dark green glass, that almost looked as if it had been pounded into shape with a hammer. The handle was carved in the shape of leaping jaguar, the blade coming out of its mouth, and was decorated with a mosaic; the yellow and black spotted fur of the jaguar made up of dozens of tiny chips of coloured stone, even down to the details of eyes, ears and tail. It certainly was not a murder weapon you saw every day.

            "Not a good way to go," muttered Mirabi. "At least it would have been quick."

She snapped open the crime scene kit on her belt and took out four small shield nodes and placed them around the body. She switched them on and a pale grey force dome rose from them over the body, keeping the crime scene uncontaminated.

            "Has anyone touched him?" I said. The dome could only keep the scene clean after we'd put it there.

            "I'm afraid so," said Dr. Julian Ra. "When I first saw him. Before... before I was sure he was dead. I tried to rouse him. Megan?"

            "No," said Megan Uzume, shaking her head. She blinked back tears again. "I... I was too shocked. I couldn't..."

            "Obviously no one's moved it since then," said Isabel Chernobog. "Everyone who's ever watched a police drama knows not to do that. Are you two really from ChronOps?"

            "Read the uniform," said Mirabi.

            "Does anyone recognize the knife?" I said.

            "No," said Dr. David Zeus. "We already checked. No one's seen it before, here or in the past. I mean, it certainly looks Mayan — maybe even slightly Aztec — but it's definitely nothing we've brought back as part of the Project."

            "What is this Project, by the way?" said Mirabi, looking around. "What are you doing here?"

            "What?" said Zeus, gazing at her. "You don't know?"

            "ChronOps licensed us for this," said Ra.

            "We're field officers, Doctors," I said. "We don't keep track of everything the temporal licensing department gives approval for."

            "But this is one of the greatest academic achievements in human history!" said Zeus. "If not the greatest. Your deputy-commander approved it personally. So did all the university directors and the Solar Union parliament."

            "Well, they forgot to mention it to us," said Mirabi. "What is this, Doctor?"

            "Oh," said Zeus. "This is the Project. The Ancient Library Temporal Preservation Project. You're standing in the Lost Libraries Archive."

_          _          _          _          _

"You rescue old libraries?" said Mirabi, several minutes later.

            "We save the contents of the books, not than the books themselves, but yes," said Isabel Chernobog. "A library is the information stored in it, after all."

            "A large number of humanity's oldest libraries were destroyed by war, accident or religious bigotry," said Dr. Julian Ra. He gestured back towards the main room and the other rooms with names which — I realised now — were place names from different eras in Earth history. "That's what happened to all the ones you see here. What we do is backstep to sixty years before their destruction. We take back digital scanners, disguised as locally manufactured items, establish relations with the locals and gain access to the Libraries, where we discreetly scan and record all of the texts. We then bring the data back to the present for our own specialist historians to study here. The library then gets destroyed on schedule, but its contents are preserved.  As you can see, we've recorded the complete collections of the libraries of Alexandria, Nishapur, Antioch and Ctesiphon and we have the libraries of Constantinople, Ghazna and al-Hakam II to do in the future,"

            "I still think we should go to only one year before so we don't miss anything, but it's been a huge success," said Dr. David Zeus. "We've transformed our understanding of several ancient cultures already. I mean, we can backstep to visit them, sure, but only for short trips. Having all their books to read takes scholarship to a whole new level. We're changing the world for the better and repairing the mistakes of the past."

            "Yes, but we're still not going to one year before, David," said Ra. "It's too risky."

            "These are all from the latest one we've saved. The Mayan libraries of Yucatan," said Max Ishtar. He took one of the books down from the nearest shelf and opened it. It was made of a single long sheet of material, which my Helmcom automatically scanned and identified as tree bark, folded to make separate pages. The pages were covered in rounded hieroglyphic symbols and drawings in profile of people with long ears and huge noses wearing all kinds of headdresses. "These aren't the original books, of course. We get them specially made so that visitors will be able to see what they were like when we're finally open to the public. The originals are going to be destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors in 1562... Well, no. They were destroyed in 1562. Anyway, we finished recording them two days ago."

            "It's why we were having a party," said Megan Uzume. "We always have one to celebrate when we've saved another library.

            "I see," I said, nodding to myself

I wasn't going to say it out loud, but I actually approved. The project was a refreshing change from the usual things most people in the Solar System wanted to use time travel for. I'd lost count of the number of times Mirabi and I had had to rescue temporal tourists who'd gotten into trouble with the locals on backsteps, usually because they'd been attempting to treat the past like a museum. The staff of the Library Project were obviously intelligent enough not to make that mistake and I could imagine all of them easily interacting with the locals in any time zone. There was always some chance of upsetting them, but this, Anubis had explained, was what he and his team — whom he'd introduced as Alex Bast, Jason Seth, Catherine Sobek, Timothy Sekhmet and Amelia Hathor — were here for; to act as a rescue team in case any of the project members did get trapped in the past by the locals. Overall, it was very nice to see time travel being used for something worthwhile for a change.

            "But we don't have any responsibility for maintaining security here in the present," said Alex Bast to Mirabi, pointing at the Professor's body. "You can't hold us responsible us for this. It does not mean we're incompetent."

            "Don't worry. I'm not bothered about what you leave off your CV," said Mirabi, who was scanning the area around the body with her wristcom. "Three extra DNA types, Erik."

            "Oh, those will probably be from Alan, Bernard, and Domingo," said Zeus. "They're also on the Project."

            "I see. Where are they?" I said. The lack of foreign DNA made it not conclusive, but much more likely, that the murder had been committed by someone who was standing around us right now.

            "They're still in the past," said Ra. "We never to leave too abruptly after we've finished. We always say proper goodbyes to the locals and depart in a way that respects local custom."

            "They've been back there for three hours," said Anubis, looking at his watchcom. "None of them were here when it happened."

            "OK. We still need to talk to them," I said. "Do they have a temporal comlink?"

            "Sorry, no. Only emergency beacons," said Zeus. "We're going to have to go back and get them."

            "Fine," I said. "Mirabi?"

            "Yes. Go ahead," said Mirabi, without looking around. She was crouching down to scan the knife through the force dome. "I'll stay."

            "Really?" I said. I blinked. It was Mirabi's taste for adventure that had led her to join ChronOps, but nearly six years as an officer had also made her a history buff.