WITH THE LIGHTNINGS(52)

"Amazing!" Daniel said honestly. He'd have guessed it would take the better part of a lifetime to convert the chaos he'd first seen here into order. A couple weeks would be sufficient. Though—

"I don't quite understand the numbering system though, mis—that is, Adele," he went on. "These . . ."

He indicated the cookbooks and stellar directions cheek by jowl.

"Yes, sections sixteen and seventeen," Adele said. Her grave expression dissolved into a smile. "The sixteenth item I pulled from the crate with which I started was Easy Recipes for Frontier Worlds by Cyprian. You'll not be surprised to learn that the volume underneath it was the Star Sector 30 Pilot."

"Oh," said Daniel. It sounded like an absolutely terrible system, scarcely better than putting the books up at random. "Well, with a proper index . . ." he added.

The librarian smiled broadly—broadly for her, at least. "Right up here," she said, tapping her temple with an index finger. She laughed aloud at his expression. "Daniel, this is a rough sort. I'll arrange the holdings according to the standards of the Academic Collections as soon as I've got them out of boxes. Until then you've got to depend on me to find anything."

"Oh," he said in relief. At least he hadn't said anything aloud.

"Ms. Mundy is a genius," Vanness said with a belligerence that was unnecessary, given Daniel's complete agreement. "She's better than any system."

"Thank you for the thought, Vanness," she said dryly. "I'm confident that I'm not immortal, however. Certainly the rest of my family wasn't. I hope to leave my successor a monument to my skill, not my arrogance."

"Ah," said Daniel. He hadn't missed the reference to the Proscriptions. "As a matter of fact, I had Candace drop me here rather than back at my lodgings because I had another question for you."

He waggled the handkerchief. "But if you're busy . . . ?"

"Prester, Vanness," Adele said. "Take a break. As a matter of fact, why don't you both go on home. I think we've cleared enough room, at least with a little judicious restacking of the piles."

"I'll wait, mistress," Vanness said.

"I'll wait too," said the other assistant, a young woman whom Daniel would have described as plain if he'd had any reason to describe her. "It's not as though I need to get home, after all."

"I've got my measurements, Ms. Mundy," the journeyman carpenter said. "I'll be off now, if you don't mind."

"Of course, Reckwith," Adele said formally. "Give my regards to Master Carpenter Bozeman when you see her. I'm delighted with her work and yours."

In an aside that Daniel could barely hear and was only sibilance to the Kostromans, she added, "Contact with sailors who take pride in hard work has instilled a spirit of emulation in the better segment of my staff. I'm as pleased by this result as I'm surprised."

From what Hogg had told Daniel, half the staff was in awe of the Electoral Librarian and the other half was terrified. "The wogs were lucky none of them took Ms. Mundy up on her offer to shoot them," Hogg believed. Daniel didn't disagree.

"I'm glad to hear that," Daniel said. He unknotted the handkerchief.

"Another bug?" Adele asked with a smile. She walked over to the data console now half-hidden behind a wall of older electronics. Most of that equipment didn't seem to be in working order or even complete, but with time and skill it might be possible to retrieve data from the wrecks.

"A beetle, yes," he said. He displayed the lichen-eater that he'd scooped up as he left the tunnel behind Bet. "Hexapod, wingless, longitudinal blue and black stripes. Fused cephalothorax and soft abdomen, but the crucial thing is the six legs."

"I thought bugs on Kostroma had four legs," Adele said as holograms shimmered in the air before her. "Well, I suppose nothing's absolute."

"In biology," Daniel replied, "I'd have said absolutes are pretty nearly universal."

Adele manipulated her console with wands she held like a pair of writing styluses. Daniel knew the technique offered much greater speed and flexibility than the virtual keyboard he used himself, but a minuscule variation in a wand's angle or rotation could introduce huge database errors.

He didn't imagine that was a problem that Adele faced very often.

"I'm sorry," Adele said as she scowled at her display. "I'm not finding anything. As a matter of fact, the information I can access doesn't show any native Kostroman animals with six legs. The information may be in error, but . . ."

She looked up Daniel. "Surely the most likely cause is that the bug is from offplanet. I don't have records for all the possibilities or even most of them, I'm afraid."