Manuscript Tradition Read online

  Had he torched his own house? Why would anyone do such an insane thing? His family’d lived there forever. The voice-over’d said so. You wouldn’t all of a sudden turn two and a half centuries of life to smoke and ash, would you?

  Not unless you were covering your tracks, she thought with wintry clarity. But where would he run? His name and all the data the infosphere had soaked up about him would warn if he tried to get a plane ticket or rent a car or probably even take a bus, though you could still feed some buses cash. Surveillance cameras scanned almost every square centimeter.

  People still talked about living off the grid. They talked about it, but very few did it. The grid had grown tighter and tighter year by year, decade by decade. These days, hardly anything slipped through it.

  Feyrouz was getting ready for bed when she stopped short, her mouth still all foamy with toothpaste. Suppose Tony Loquasto wasn’t nuts. Suppose he’d come to Earth from Faraday eight hundred years ago, maybe longer. Suppose years, decades, even centuries weren’t that big a deal to him. Wouldn’t he have something up his sleeve, something this oh-so-up-to-date twenty-third century might not know anything about?

  She laughed at herself, finished brushing, and went to sleep. She’d be tired and grouchy in the morning as things were. The way she was getting silly now said she really needed to grab what rest she could.

  A West Haven police lieutenant waited for her outside the Beinecke when she got there. Mandela Jeter wanted to hear everything she could tell him about Tony Loquasto. She didn’t hide anything. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, as she knew. She called up the video from the secure room and let Jeter listen to the custodian claiming to be an alien.

  “Wow!” the police officer said, shaking his head in bemusement. “He had a glitch in his firmware, didn’t he?”

  “Plainly, there’s a connection between Faraday and the Voynich Manuscript,” Feyrouz said. “If you want me to think that connection includes our janitor…” She shook her head, too.

  “I hear you.” Jeter spiraled a finger by his ear. “Well, we’ll run him down pretty soon, I bet. There’s nobody in what’s left of the old house—we know that now.”

  “Oh-huh.” Feyrouz had learned as much over breakfast. “When you do find him, would I be able to talk with him?”

  “I can’t promise, but I don’t see why not.” The lieutenant whistled between his teeth. “I don’t know what I figured you’d tell me, but aliens from another planet wasn’t it. Can’t wait to see the captain’s face when I drop this on her.” Away he went, leaving Feyrouz to get on with the rest of the craziness of her day.

  But they didn’t run Tony Loquasto down, not pretty soon and not later, either. Feyrouz wondered about him till she retired at eighty-eight, and, in fact, till she died at 107—a good age, if not a great one. Every so often, she’d put on white gloves and flip through the Voynich Manuscript. It never told her anything she didn’t already know. Her best guess was that it never would.

  About the Author

  The author of many science fiction and fantasy novels, including The Guns of the South, the "World War" series, and The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Harry Turtledove lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Laura Frankos, and their four daughters. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Harry Turtledove

  Art copyright © 2020 by Scott Bakal