Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

There is a third possibility. Edgar Deckle is technically part of Corvina’s crew, but he has a few things going for him:

1. He’s an established coconspirator.

2. He guards the door to the Reading Room, so he must be pretty high up in the fellowship, and therefore have access to many secrets.

3. He knew Moffat. And, most important of all:

4. He’s in the phone book. Brooklyn.

It feels appropriately weighty and Unbroken Spine-ish to send him a letter. This is something I haven’t done in more than a decade. The last letter I wrote in ink on paper was a mushy missive to my long-distance pseudo-girlfriend in the gold-tinted week after science camp. I was thirteen. Leslie Murdoch never wrote back.

For this new epistle, I select heavy archival-grade paper. I purchase a sharp-tipped rollerball pen. I carefully compose my message, first explaining all that transpired up on Google’s bright screens and then asking Edgar Deckle what he knows, if anything, about Clark Moffat’s audiobook editions. I crumple six sheets of the archival-grade paper in the process because I keep misspelling words or smashing them together. My handwriting is still terrible.

Finally, I drop the letter into a bright blue mailbox and hope for the best.

*   *   *

Three days later, an email appears. It’s from Edgar Deckle. He proposes that we video chat.

Well, fine.

*   *   *

It’s just past noon on a Sunday when I click the green camera icon. The feed comes to life and there is Deckle, peering down into his computer, his round nose slightly foreshortened. He’s sitting in a narrow, light-filled room with yellow walls; I think there’s a skylight somewhere up above him. Behind his fuzzy crown of hair, I can see copper cooking pots hanging from hooks, and the front of a gleaming black refrigerator festooned with bright magnets and faint drawings.

“I liked your letter,” Deckle says, smiling, holding up the archival-grade paper folded into neat thirds.

“Right, well. I figured. Anyway.”

“I already knew what happened in California,” he says. “Word travels fast in the Unbroken Spine. You shook things up.”

I expected him to be angry about all that, but he’s smiling. “Corvina took some heat. People were angry.”

“Don’t worry, he did his best to stop it.”

“Oh, no—no. They were angry we hadn’t tried it already ourselves. ‘This upstart Google shouldn’t have all the fun,’ they said.”

That makes me smile. Maybe Corvina’s rule isn’t as absolute as it seems.

“But you’re still at it?” I ask.

“Even though Google’s mighty computers didn’t find anything?” Deckle says. “Sure. I mean, come on. I have a computer.” He flicks a finger against the lid of his laptop and it makes the camera wobble. “They’re not magic. They’re only as capable as their programmers, right?”

Yeah, but those were some pretty capable programmers.

“To tell you the truth,” Deckle says, “we did lose some people. A few of the younger folks, unbound, still just starting out. But that’s fine. It’s nothing compared to—”

There’s a blur of motion behind Deckle, and a tiny face appears up over his shoulder, stretching to see the screen. It’s a little girl, and I am astonished to see that she is a miniature Deckle. She has sunny blond hair, long and tangled, and she has his nose. She looks about six years old.

“Who’s that?” she says, pointing at the screen. So, Edgar Deckle is hedging his bets: immortality by book and immortality by blood. Do any of the others have kids?

“That’s my friend Clay,” Deckle says, curling his arm around her waist. “He knows Uncle Ajax. He lives in San Francisco, too.”

“I like San Francisco!” she says. “I like whales!”

Deckle leans in close to his daughter and stage-whispers, “What sound does a whale make, sweetie?”

The girl wriggles out of his grasp, stands up straight on tiptoe, and makes a sort of moo-meow sound while doing a slow pirouette. It’s her whale impression. I laugh, and she looks at the screen with bright eyes, enjoying the attention. She makes the whale-song again, this time spinning away, her feet slipping on the kitchen floor. The moo-meow fades into the next room.

Deckle smiles and watches her go. “So, to get to the point,” he says, turning back to me, “no: I can’t help you. I saw Clark Moffat at the store, but after he solved the Founder’s Puzzle—in about three months—he headed straight for the Reading Room. I never saw him after that, and I definitely don’t know anything about his audiobook. To tell you the truth, I hate audiobooks.”

But an audiobook is like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your—

“You know who you should talk to, right?”

Of course I do: “Penumbra.”

Deckle nods. “He held the key to Moffat’s codex vitae—did you know that? They were close, at least for a while there.”

“But I can’t find him,” I say dejectedly. “He’s like a ghost.” Then I realize I’m talking to the man’s favorite novice. “Wait—do you know where he lives?”

“I do,” Deckle says. He looks straight into the camera. “But I’m not going to tell you.”