Ajax Penumbra E-Book

Robin Sloan

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 93

Beschreibung

The utterly charming prequel to the New York Times-bestseller Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore. San Francisco, 1969. The summer of drugs, music and a new age dawning. A young, earnest Ajax Penumbra has been given his first assignment as a Junior Acquisitions Officer - to find the single surviving copy of the Techne Tycheon, a mysterious volume that has brought and lost great fortune for anyone who has owned it. After a few weeks of rigorous hunting, Penumbra feels no closer to his goal than when he started. But late one night, after another day of dispiriting dead ends, he stumbles upon a 24-hour bookstore and the possibilities before him expand exponentially. With the help of his friend's homemade computer, an ancient map, a sunken ship and the vast shelves of the 24-hour bookstore, Ajax Penumbra might just find what he's seeking...

Leseprobe

Ajax Penumbra 1969

Ajax Penumbra 1969

Robin Sloan

First published in the United States of America in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Robin Sloan, 2013

The moral right of Robin Sloan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBook ISBN: 978 1 78239 446 4

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright

A 24-Hour Bookstore

Ajax Penumbra!

Friedrich & Fang

Psychohistorian

The Gift

Members Only

The Sandhog Cometh

The Wreck of the William Gray

A Million Random Digits

Climbers

Appendix

‘An extract from Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore’

The Society of the Unbroken Spine

A Note About the Author

A 24-Hour Bookstore

A visitor walks the city, searching. He has a list: libraries and bookstores, museums and archives. He descends into the bowels of the San Francisco Chronicle, follows a sullen clerk to the morgue’s oldest files. There, the newsprint is brittle to the touch. He handles it carefully but confidently, his fingers trained for the task, but the Chronicle is too young. He does not find the name he is looking for.

The visitor canvasses Chinatown, learns to say Bookstore? in Cantonese: Shu diàn? He braves the haze of Haight Street, speaks to a long-haired man selling books on a blanket in Golden Gate Park. He crosses the bay to Cody’s and Cal, ventures south to Kepler’s and Stanford. He inquires at City Lights, but the man behind the register, whose name is Shig, shakes his head. “Never heard of him, man. Never heard of him.” He sells the visitor a copy of “Howl” instead.

It is 1969, and San Francisco is under construction. The great central artery of Market Street is a trench. South of there, whole blocks have been knocked down and scraped clean; a fence is festooned with signs that proclaim it the YERBA BUENA GARDENS, though there is not a single plant or tree in evidence. To the north, the visitor passes a construction site where a wide ziggurat reaches for the sky and a placard promises THE FUTURE SITE OF THE TRANSAMERICA PYRAMID above a fine-lined rendering of a shining spear.

The visitor walks the city, disappointed. There is no place left to go; his list is folded and finished. He hikes to the Golden Gate Bridge, because he knows his parents will ask him about it. A quarter of the way across, he turns back. He expected a view of the city, but the bay is filled with fog, and his short-sleeved shirt is flapping in the frigid wind.

The visitor walks back to his hotel, going slowly, wallowing in his failure. In the morning, he will buy a train ticket home. He walks along the water for a while, then cuts into the city. He follows the border between North Beach and Chinatown, and there, wedged between an Italian restaurant and a Chinese pharmacy, he finds a bookstore.

Inside the restaurant, the chairs are all turned up on red-checked tablecloths. The pharmacy stands shadowed, doors drawn tight with dark loops of chain. The whole street is sleeping; it is nearly midnight. The bookstore, though, is wide awake.

He hears it before he sees it: the murmur of conversation, the tinny swirl of a song. The sound swells as the bookstore’s door swings open and bodies tumble out into the street. The bodies are young, trailing long hair and loose fabric. The visitor hears the flick of a lighter, sees a leaping spark. The bodies pass something around, sighing and exhaling long plumes that merge with the fog. The visitor hangs back, watching. They pass the something around again, then fling it out into the street and go back inside.

He draws closer. The front of the store is all windows, top to bottom, square panes set into a grid of iron, entirely fogged over. Inside, it looks like a party in progress. He sees faces and hands, dark mops of hair, all made Impressionistic by the foggy glass. The song is one he has heard elsewhere in the city; something popular.

He pushes the door and a wave of yeasty warmth washes over him. Somewhere above, a bell tinkles brightly, announcing him, but no one notices. He cannot get the door entirely open; it bumps up against someone’s back, someone’s loose jacket covered with a constellation of patches. The visitor squeezes in sideways, muttering a quiet apology, but the jacket-wearer doesn’t notice; he is engrossed in conversation with a woman clutching a portable radio, the source of the swirling song.

The bookstore is tiny: tall and narrow. From his position near the corner, the visitor surveys the space and decides that there are fewer customers here than at City Lights, probably less than two dozen—it’s just that they are all squashed into a fraction of the floor space.

The small-but-concentrated crowd wraps itself around several low tables, each sprouting a small handwritten sign, like POETRY and SCIENCE FICTION and AS SEEN IN THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. Some in the crowd are browsing the books; two bushy-bearded men pick at the CINEMA table, arguing and gesticulating. Others are reading outright; a woman in a green dress stands in place, mesmerized by a Fantastic Four comic book. Mostly, though, the crowd is paying attention to itself: talking, nodding, laughing, flirting, lifting hair from eyes, tucking it back behind ears. Everyone has long hair, and the visitor feels suddenly self-conscious about his number 3 buzz.

He snakes his way through the crowd, heading for the cash register, trying not to touch anyone. Hygiene levels range widely. Voices echo on the bare floorboards, and he picks up scraps of conversation:

“… a trip, you know …”

“… up in Marin …”

“… at the Led Zep …”

“… like, dog food …”

There is more to the bookstore. Beyond the low tables, dominating the back half of the store, there are shelves that stretch taller and disappear into the darkness above. Ladders extend perilously up into the gloom. The heavy denizens of those shelves look altogether more serious than the books up front, and the crowd seems to leave them alone—although it is possible, the visitor supposes, that some furtive activity is taking place in the deepest shadows.

He feels profoundly uncomfortable. He wants to turn around and leave. But … this is a bookstore. It might hold some clue.

When the visitor reaches the cash register, he finds the clerk arguing with a customer. The figures contrast sharply: two different decades facing off across a wide, heavy desk. The customer is a bendy twig of a man with stringy hair tied into a ponytail; the clerk is a sturdy plank with thick arms that stretch the wales of his sweater. He has a neat mustache under dark hair slicked back from his brow; he looks less like a bookstore clerk and more like a sailor.

“The restroom is for customers,” the clerk insists.

“I bought a book last week, man,” the customer protests.

“Is that so? I have no doubt that you read a book last week—oh, I saw you doing it—but as for purchasing …” The clerk hauls out a fat leather-bound tome, flips deftly through its pages. “No, I’m afraid I don’t see anything here…. What’s your name again?”

The customer smiles beatifically. “Coyote.”

“Coyote, of course…. No, I don’t see any Coyote here. I see a Starchild … a Frodo … but no Coyote.”

“Starchild, yeah! That’s my last name. Come on, man. I gotta take a whiz.” The customer—Coyote … Starchild?—bounces on his heels.

The clerk clenches his jaw. He produces a skeleton key with a long gray tassel. “Be quick about it.” The customer snatches the key and disappears between the tall shelves; as he goes, two others fall into step alongside him.

“No loitering!” the clerk calls after them. “No …” He sighs, then snaps his head around to face the visitor. “Well? What?”

“Ah. Hello.” The visitor smiles. “I am looking for a book.”

The clerk pauses. Recalibrates. “Really?” His jaw seems to unclench.

“Yes. Or rather, I mean that I am looking for a particular book.”

“Marcus!” a voice calls out. The clerk’s gaze lifts. The woman with the portable radio is hoisting a book up above the crowd, jabbing a finger at its cover: Naked Came the Stranger. “Mar-cus! You been reading this while nobody’s around, right?”

The clerk frowns, and does not favor her with a reply, but bounces a fist on the surface of the desk and mutters, to no one in particular, “I don’t know why he would stock anything so tawdry….”

“A particular book,” the visitor prods gently.

The clerk’s gaze snaps back. He presses his mouth into a tight line; something well short of a smile. “Of course. What’s the title?”

The visitor says it slowly, enunciating clearly: “The Techne Tycheon. That’s T-E-C-H—”

“Yes, techne, I know. And with tycheon … that would be ‘the craft of fortune,’ correct?”

“Exactly so!” the visitor exclaims.

“Mar-cus!” the woman’s voice calls again. This time, the clerk ignores her entirely.

“Contrary to however it might appear,” he says flatly, “this is a place of scholarly inquiry.” He retrieves an oblong book, wider than it is tall. “I don’t recognize that title, but let me double-check.” He flips through the pages, revealing a gridded ledger—a kind of catalog. “Nothing under T … What’s the author’s name?”

The visitor shakes his head. “It is a very old volume. I only have the title. But I know it was here, in San Francisco, at a bookstore managed by a certain … Well, it is a somewhat complicated story.”

The clerk’s eyes narrow, not with suspicion, but with deep interest. He sets the catalog aside. “Tell me.”

“It is—ah.” The visitor turns, expecting to see customers queuing behind him; there is no one. He turns back to the clerk. “It will take some time.”

“It’s a twenty-four-hour bookstore,” the clerk says. He smiles almost ruefully. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

“I should start at the beginning.”

“You should start with the basics.” The clerk settles back on his stool, crosses his arms. “What’s your name, friend?”

“Oh. Yes, of course. My name is Ajax Penumbra.”