VI

"Oh, gentle Darwin!" said Dr. Anthony Hades, looking down at the body. He looked up at Mirabi. "I'm sorry. I know you told me, but... Somehow, I was hoping it wouldn't be true."

            Mirabi had returned from Earth with Hades a few minutes ago. The latest doctor was a short, slim man in his mid-thirties, with grey eyes and short dark hair curling on the top of his head. He'd come not just straight from Earth, but straight from the archaeological excavation he was conducting in present day Yucatan and still had mud and dust on his boots and was wearing a sunhat, which he had taken off as soon as he saw the Professor's body.

            "I'm afraid it is," said Mirabi. "Do you have any idea who might have done it?"

            "What? Oh, no. No. None at all," said Dr. Anthony Hades, looking between me and Mirabi. He'd seemed unusually nervous from the minute he'd arrived here and I made a mental note – even if he wasn't involved in the murder – to do a background check and see if he was involved in anything he shouldn't be. "I've been at the dig all day. I'm sleeping down there at the moment. I haven't been since here last week."

            "We did invite you to the party, Tony," said Zeus.

            "Yes, but you're not having it now, surely?"

            "Do you recognise the murder weapon, Doctor?" I said. "Is it anything you've found on your... dig?"

            I was trying to remember what the terminology was because – while I came across all sorts of people in my career as a ChronOps officer – Hades was the first professional archaeologist I'd met. His field was one of the numerous branches of historical study that was slowly being killed off by licensed academic time travel and would probably be an entry in history books itself – or the subject of one of Zeus's documentaries – in a hundred years.

            "Oh, no. Good grief, no. I haven't seen anything like it," said Hades. He paused, then leaned down so he could peer at the knife more closely. "It's certainly Mayan, but... No. It looks undamaged. It's far too clean."

            "Really?" said Ishtar, looking at the blood-congealed blade again. I had allowed him to come back into the Yucatan room with us because – despite his ill-conceived attempt at temporal cheating – he was still a witness if not a suspect. He might yet possess useful information without realising it.

            "I meant it hasn't been in the ground," said Hades. "There'd be stains. Debris trapped in the crevices. It can't have been buried. The mosaic work looks almost brand new. It's a beautiful piece, actually."

            "So it's nothing you've dug up?" said Mirabi.

            "No," said Hades, shaking his head. Then he stopped suddenly, in mid-shake. His mouth half-formed something and his eyes narrowed.

            "Actually... Now I've said that..."

"What?" said Mirabi. Hades straightened up and turned to face us.

            "A few weeks ago, we did find a sarcophagus," he said. "An intact Mayan sarcophagus. They're incredibly rare. We haven't had a chance to examine it properly yet – Tutal Xiu's a really rich site. We're pulling loads of stuff out of the ground – but the hieroglyphics on it, the inscriptions... They mentioned a jaguar knife."

            "Really?" I said.

"You didn't show this to me," said Domingo Xibalba.

"I haven't had a chance to. You've been spending so much time in the past recently," said Hades.

"I am trying to absorb all I can before the project finishes in this period," said Xibalba.

"Where is this sarcophagus now?" I said.

            "It's in storage," said Hades. "With all the other artefacts we're trying to analyse. Several thousand. We've got a real backlog at the moment. I've got nowhere near enough students this year. I... No, I'm sorry. I can't remember the box number. I'll have to look it up."

            "Well, please do," said Mirabi.

            "The list is back down at the dig."

            "Go ahead," said Mirabi. I nodded my consent as well. Despite his obvious and slightly suspicious jitteriness, Helmcom polygraph had passed all of Hades's statements at 85%+ or higher. Given that it was almost impossible to lie well enough to fool Helmcom when you were nervous, he was more than likely to be innocent.

            "So someone did bring it forwards?" said Isabel Chernobog, as Timothy Sobek escorted Hades back to the teleporter.

            "It looks like it," I said, as Anubis scowled silently. I could guess how he felt. If someone apart from Ishtar had been making illegal backsteps to the past, it meant that all his efforts and security precautions had been for nothing. The knife might not even be the only thing that had been smuggled to the present.

            "Yes. But what about these other three dates?" said Mirabi, looking at Anubis's boardcom. "Could it have come from one of them?"

            "I would imagine so," said Anubis. "Though I don't know what was going on at those times. I'm no historian."

            "Doctors?" I said, turning to the academics.

            "Oh, boy. A lot of stuff," said Zeus.

            "I'm afraid so," said Ra, frowning as he tried to remember. "Humanity was still confined to Earth at all of those time periods. We hadn't even made it to the moon yet. There were numerous civilisations doing various things. In 2500BC, well... Rice was being eaten in Malaysia for the first time. The first kingdom of Armenia was being founded..."

            "The Harappan Civilisation was at its peak in the Indus valley," said Baldr. "The Great Sphinx was being built in Egypt..."

            "The Canaanites were settling down in Syria," said Zeus. "The Sumerians were using donkeys to pull chariots. Oh, and the first ever skis were being used in Sweden."

            "OK. And the others?" said Mirabi.

            "Well, 1581... King Philip II of Spain became the king of Portugal," said Ra.

            "There was that famous meteorite strike in Germany," said Baldr.

            "That was Thuringia," said Zeus. "Francis Drake got his knighthood in England. Oda Nobunaga invaded Iga Province in Japan. The Russians started conquering Siberia."

            "Right. Good," I said. I was starting to realise that we shouldn't have gotten three professional historians started on the topic of what had happened in a particular year. Once the ball had started rolling, it wouldn't be stopping by itself.

            "As for 1607... the Bank of Genoa went bankrupt and took most of Spain with it," said Ra. "The Jesuits built their first mission in the Sierra Madre in Mexico..."

            "Susenyos defeated his rivals and became Emperor of Ethiopia," said Baldr. "Monteverdi's L'Orfio was premiered."

            "The English built Jamestown in Virginia," said Zeus, counting the events off on his fingers. "William Shakespeare's daughter Susanna got married. Oh, and Hamlet was performed for the first time in Sierra Leone."

            "OK. I understand," I said, holding up my hand. "But was there anything directly connected to this or to the Project?"

            "...Not that I can think of, no," said Ra.

            "Fine then. Let's go back to basics," said Mirabi. She pointed to the Professor's body. "The murder weapon. What did you say it's made of?"

            "Obsidian," said Domingo Xibalba. "My people were skilled metal-workers at this time, but we hadn't yet learnt how to smelt iron."

            "It's not a bad material for a blade, actually," said Zeus. "You can get an edge sharper than carbon steel with it. Surgeons were still using obsidian scalpels as late as the 21st century."

            "Fine. And how much of it do you normally have around here?" said Mirabi.

            "Obsidian? Uh... None that I know about," said Zeus.

            "The scientific departments may have some, but they're on the other side of the university," said Ra.

            "I haven't brought any with me," said Xibalba, quickly checking the decorations in his headdress.

            "Great. Then it shouldn't be too difficult to retrace the steps of this bit," said Mirabi, squatting down and scanning the blade of the knife with her wristcom again. "Let's do an elements scan."

            I inwardly cursed myself for not thinking of this, and for not thinking of it earlier. Any large area with an artificially maintained breathable atmosphere had to be constantly watching for contamination by unfriendly inhalable elements. At Oxbridge Luna, where you could walk about outside with only the energy dome separating you from the lunar vacuum, the risk would be doubled. The university's life support system was bound to have some very sensitive detection equipment built in, and ready to sound an alarm, if anything toxic started to build up to dangerous levels.

            "Yes, of course we have them," said Baldr. "The chemistry department sets it off by accident at least twice a year."

            "Great. Let's see how well it can smell obsidian," said Mirabi, tapping on her wristcom as it linked to one of the university's wallcom terminals.

            "It can actually detect individual elements?" said Isabel Chernobog, watching over Mirabi's shoulder.

            "Yes, so stop breathing on it," said Mirabi. "Erik. Wormlinking."

            "Receiving," I said. The results flashed up on the inside of my own helmet visor. The staff and students gathered around the terminal as it came up on the screen there too.

            The standard elements the system was detecting in the air right now were displayed down the side in a bar graph of differing sizes. There was slightly more iron and silica present than usual, but that would be from the lunar dust. All the other essential elements were present and in safe concentrations. There were a few other unusual trace elements, which had to be from the stone, paper and parchment of all the replica ancient books, and sure enough, a large concentration of obsidian was showing at the bottom.

            "Yes!" said Mirabi, as she scrolled back through the day's records. "OK. Got it. It's been here, in this section of the building since... Hax."

            I sighed as I saw it as well. The knife had been here since at least thirty minutes before the murder. But while the system was sensitive enough to detect it, it could only isolate it to the general area of this floor and the rooms in the library. It wasn't sensitive enough to tell us exactly where it was now or where it had been, so we could trace how it had moved around, or where it had started from before ending its journey between the Professor's ribs.

            "OK. Delete Plan A," said Mirabi.

            "Don't worry. It was a good idea," I said.

            "I might be able to rig you up something more accurate, Detective," said Jason Seth, who Anubis had introduced as the technical-minded member of his team, examining the reading. "Modify a palmcom and use it as a handheld. But it would take a while. And I'm not sure if I've got enough tools."

            "Don't bother then," I said. "All right. If the weapon isn't going to get us anywhere, let's try something else."

            "Such as?" said Mirabi.

            "The victim."

_          _          _          _          _

The university teachers on the Project all had offices in a small corridor behind the Alexandria room. Four identical doors with their name plaques stood in a line. Professor Henry Wei'To was the first door on the left.

            "No one's been in here since it happened, Detective," said Megan Uzume, touching the small pad that opened the door.

            "Good," I said. "Do you happen to know when the Professor was last here?"

            "Yes. About... two hours after lunchtime?" said Uzume. "He was writing up his notes from Tutal Xiu, and I came to give him my thesis proposal. I finished it last night. After that, he... he went to unpack the books. I don't think anyone else came to see him."

            "OK," I said, as I looked around.

            Professor Wei'To clearly had not been absent-minded and neither had anyone murdered him because his untidiness was driving them crazy. The office was a small, cubic room with no windows, but it wasn't claustrophobic because everything was immaculate and neatly organised. Books and boardcoms stood on shelves all around the room. The walls were hung with framed holo-certificates, photographs and watercolour paintings that, judging from the style, Wei'To must have painted himself. Other shelves contained souvenirs from trips in the past and present, including artefacts, fossils and seashells, which he seemed to have collected for their beauty just as much as any historical value they had and there was also a small, discreet shelf of academic trophies. There was a half-full waste paper basket and some loose documents on the desk, but the only thing that looked like it had been added recently was a large map of Tutal Xiu, with the library temple clearly marked.

            "I don't think anything's missing," said Megan Uzume, looking around behind me.

            "Would you know if it was?" I asked.

            "Yes. I think so. I've spent a lot of time in here," she said. "Professor Wei'To was my supervisor. I saw him in here nearly every day."

            "What was he like?" I said. There was always a chance that Wei'To might have revealed sides of himself to his students that he hadn't to his colleagues, or that she had picked up some personality traits that Ra, Zeus and Baldr had missed.

            "He was very kind," said Uzume. "He helped me a lot when I first came here. I... I'm on a full scholarship, you see."

            "Really?" I glanced at her. That was a surprise. Chernobog was Jupiter Nobilita, which meant she had oil money to burn even if she came from a minor family and, judging from Ishtar and Baal's clothes and haircuts, neither of them were working part time jobs to pay their tuition. I inwardly cursed myself again for making an assumption about a suspect.

            "I'm from the Independent Asteroids," said Uzume. "I don't have any family. I didn't... I had a hard time getting used to Oxbridge in my first year. Professor Wei'To understood and helped me a lot.  He mentored me. It was why I joined the Library Project. I didn't want to do my doctorate with anybody else."

            "I understand," I said. I did entirely. The days when Earth-born people looked down their noses at anyone born in any of the Solar Systems other settlements were long gone. But the prejudice still lingered in other ways. Even today, a large percentage of those who'd been born on planets – or even in orbit around a gas giant – would readily sneer at anyone who came from a moon. Anyone unlucky enough to be born on an asteroid had it even worse and the Independent Asteroids were not a sought-after address in the modern Solar System. At a place like Oxbridge Luna, which – despite its generous scholarship and bursary programme – would still be very elitist, Uzume could not have had an easy time making friends. "Did I understand Doctor Zeus correctly? He won the Wells Prize for the Library Project?"

            "Oh, yes. It's over there," said Uzume, pointing to one of the trophy shelf, where three small bronze statuettes of what looked like some peculiar piece of Victorian England-era engineering sat on polished wooden bases. "It's the one in the right. And it really is his project. Using time travel to save the libraries was his idea. He presented it to the university directors and then raised the funding nearly all by himself. Doctor Zeus offered to pay for it – if he could make a documentary about it as we went along – but the Professor didn't want any distractions."

            "So it was important to him?" I said, looking at the loose documents on Wei'To's desk.

            "Oh, yes. Very much," said Uzume. "Honestly, it's come to mean a lot to all of us. It's... Well, it's not really important. But it's a good thing to do. We're saving books that got destroyed. Often for very small reasons."

            "Don't worry. You don't need to convince me," I said. I'd dealt with more than enough people who could afford time engines, but the only things they could think to do with them were vain, stupid or both. The Library project was something I might have joined myself if I'd had the free time and I could see why ChronOps had given it approval.

            "Thank you," said Uzume. "I don't think any of us are ever going to regret being part of it. Even though it can be very hard sometimes."

            "Really?" I said. "How?"

            Uzume paused and tilted her head for a moment, finding a way to explain.

            "It's the people," she said. "We spend a lot of time in the past copying the books – just Alexandria took seven months – so we always get to know the locals very well. We make friends. Sometimes, we go to dinners or feasts with them. We've joined in with local festivals. They invite us to their homes. And they often love the books just as much as we do. They live in eras when very few people could read, so they know how special they are. It's... well, it's very hard to copy the books and just leave when you know they're going to be destroyed. And when we know that a lot of the people we've become friends with are going to be killed trying to save them. And there's nothing we can do about it because..."

            She paused and shook her head.

            "I'm sorry. You're from ChronOps. You know why we can't."

            "Yes," I said. "I do."

            I stood over the desk, not looking at her, trying to resist the temptation to clench my fists and squeeze them. It wasn't Uzume's fault. She hadn't done it deliberately. She had no idea who I was and she didn't know my story. But my cloning tube was missing and I might not have escaped my predicted destiny after all. The last thing I wanted to hear about right now was people you met while time travelling who you couldn't save.

            "Detective?" said Uzume, sounding worried. Evidently, my voice or