Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(79)

After a few weeks of library visitations, he officially took Munira under his wing.

“I shall need an assistant in this endeavor,” he told her. “It is my hope that you would be interested in the position.”

Although Munira’s heart leaped, she did not let it show. Instead, she feigned ambivalence. “I would need to take a leave of absence from my studies, and were we to leave here, I would have to resign from my job at the library,” she told him. “Let me think about it.”

Then the following day, she accepted the position.

She withdrew from her classes but stayed on at the library because Scythe Faraday needed her there. Only now that their working relationship was official did he leak what he was looking for.

“It’s a place,” he told her. “It has been lost to antiquity, but I do believe it existed, and that we can find it.”

“Atlantis?” she suggested. “Camelot? Disneyland? Las Vegas?”

“Nothing so fanciful,” he said, but then reconsidered. “Or perhaps more fanciful. It depends on how you look at it. It depends on what we actually find.” He hesitated before telling her, actually looking a bit sheepish. “We’re looking for the Land of Nod.”

It made her laugh out loud. He might as well have said they were looking for Middle Earth, or the Man in the Moon.

“It’s a fiction!” she told him. “And not even a very good one.”

She knew the nursery rhyme. Everyone did. It was a simplistic metaphor for life and death—an introduction for small children to concepts they would eventually need to grasp.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But did you know that the rhyme did not exist in the Age of Mortality?”

She opened her mouth to refute the claim, but stopped herself. Most childhood rhymes came out of the mortal medieval era. She had never researched them, but others had. Scythe Faraday was thorough, however. If he said it did not exist when humankind was mortal, she had to believe him, in spite of her instinct to scoff.

“The rhyme did not evolve the way others do,” Faraday postulated. “I believe it was intentionally planted.”

Munira could only shake her head. “To what purpose?”

“That,” Scythe Faraday said, “is what I intend to find out.”

? ? ?

Munira’s tenure as Faraday’s assistant began in doubt, but she put that doubt aside, suspending judgment, so that she could do her job. Faraday was not overly demanding. He was not demeaning. He never treated her like an underling, giving her assignments that were beneath her. Instead, the tasks he set for her were worthy of her skills as a research librarian.

“I need you to dig into the backbrain and recreate the movements of all the early scythes. Places where they gathered. Spots that they traveled to repeatedly. What we’re looking for are holes in the record. Periods of time where there is no accounting for where they were.”

Digging around the Thunderhead’s massive digital backbrain for ancient information was a juicy challenge. She hadn’t had the need to access the backbrain since her apprenticeship, but she knew her way around it. Still, she could have written a dissertation on the skills she learned in the process of this particular search. It was, however, a dissertation that no one would hear, because it was done with utmost secrecy.

Yet in spite of all her forensic research, she did not produce anything they could use. There was no evidence to suggest that the founding scythes ever gathered in some secret place.

Faraday was neither discouraged or deterred. Instead, he gave her a new assignment. “Create digital versions of each of the early scythe’s first journals,” he told her. “Then run the files through the scythedom’s best decryption software, and see if it yields any coded messages.”

The software was slow—at least compared to the Thunderhead, which could have done all the calculations in a matter of seconds. The scythedom’s software was crunching for days. Finally, it began to produce data . . . but the things it vomited forth were absurd. Things like “Profound Midnight-Green Cow,” and “Irascible Glass Chicken.”

“Does any of this make sense to you?” she asked Faraday.

He shook his head sadly. “I do not believe the founding scythes were so obtuse as to create a complex code and then reward the decoder with nonsensical riddles. We already have the riddle of the rhyme. A code would have been more straightforward.

When the computer spat out “Umbrella Eggplant Victory Flight,” they admitted yet another failure.

“The harder you scrutinize randomness,” Faraday declared, “the more coincidence seems like design.”

But the word “flight” caught in Munira’s mind. Yes, it was random, but sometimes randomness led to moments of remarkable serendipity, and earthshaking discoveries.

The library’s map room did not have any actual maps. Instead, in its center revolved a holographic Earth. With a few swipes, taps, and pinches of the control screen, any portion of the globe could enlarge for study, and any era, back to time of Pangaea, could be depicted. Munira brought Scythe Faraday to the map room as soon as he arrived the next evening, but did not tell him why.

“Humor me,” she told him.

Once more, he expressed that odd combination of exasperation and infinite patience as he followed her to the map room. She tapped the controls, and the globe changed. Now it appeared to be a holographic ball of black yarn, ten feet in diameter.