The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

The scriptorium was underground, a traditional construction left over from the days when anyone literate was assumed to be a black wizard and when books of any sort needed to be protected from the torches of the ignorant and the fearful. But for its placement, though, the room was thoroughly modem, with St. Elmo's fire glowing smoothly over every cubicle and each of those cubicles with its own ground-glass access screen.

As soon as Brother Vahan and I stepped into a cubicle, the spirit of the scriptorium appeared in the ground glass. The spirit wore spectacles. I had to work to keep my face straight.

I'd never imagined folk on the Other Side could look bookish.

I turned to the abbot. "Suppose I'd come in without you or someone else who's authorized to be here?"

"You wouldn't get any information out of our friend there," Brother Vahan said. "You would get caught" He sounded quietly confident I believed him. The Thomas Brothers probably knew about as much about keeping documents secure as anyone not in government and what they didn't know, Rome did.

Brother Vahan spoke to the ground-glass screen. "Give this man unlimited access to our files and full aid for… will four hours be enough?"

"Should be plenty," I answered.

Tor four hours, then," the abbot said. Treat him in all ways as if he were one of our holy brethren." That was as blanche a carte as he could give me; I bowed my head in profound appreciation. He flipped a hand back and forth, as if to say. Think nothing of it. He could say that if he wanted to (humility is, after all, a monkish virtue), but we both knew I owed him a big one.

"Anything else?" he asked me. I shook my head. "Happy hunting, then," he said as he started out of the scriptorium.

"I'll see you later."

The spirit manifesting itself in the access screen turned its nearsighted gaze on me. "How may I serve you, child of Adam given four hours of unlimited access to the files of the Thomas Brothers?"

I told it the same thing I'd told Brother Vahan: "I want to go through births, birth defects, healings, and exorcisms within a five-mile radius of the Devonshire dump, first for the year ending exactly ten years ago and then for the year ending today." Humans can handle approximate data; with spirits you have to spell out every word and make sure you've crossed your t's and dotted your i's (and even your's).

"I shall gather the data you require. Please waif" the spirit said. The screen went blank.

In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was Cod. Yes, I know that's Brother Vahan's theology, not mine. It's a lot older than Christianity, for that matter. In Old Kingdom Egypt, the god Ptah was seen as both the tongue of the primeval god Atum and as the instrument through which Atum created the material world. Of course thought is the instrument through which we perceive and influence the Other Side; without it, we'd be as blind to magic as any dumb animals.

But John 1:1 and its variants in other creeds are also the basis of modem information theory. Because words partake of the divine, they manifest themselves in the spiritual world as well as in our own. Properly directed - ensorceled, if you will - spirits can gather, read, manipulate, and move the essence of words without ever having to handle the physical documents on which they appear. If the Greek and Roman mages had loiown that trick, their world could have been drowning in information, just as we are now.

I didn't have to wait long; as I'd expected. Brother Vahan used only the best and most thoroughly trained spirits.

Ghostly images of documents began flashing onto the access screen, one after another - records from ten years ago.

"Hold on!" I said after a few seconds.

The spirit appeared. "I obey your instructions, child of Adam," it said, as if daring me to deny it.

"I know, I know," I told it; the last thing I wanted was to get the heart of the access system mad at me. "I don't need to look at every individual report, though. Let me have the numbers in each category for the two periods. When I know what those are, I'M examine specific documents. That way, I'll be able to see forest and trees both."

The spirit looked out at me over the tops of its spectral spectacles. "You should have no difficulty in maintaining your mental view of both categories," it said reprovingly.

That's easy for someone on the Other Side to say, but I have the usual limits of flesh and blood. I just stared back at the spirit. If it kept acting uppity, I'd sic Brother Vahan on it. After a last sniff, it said, "It shall be as you desire."

One by one, the numbers came up on the screen. The Thomas Brothers certainly did have a well-drilled scriptorium spirit; the creature wrote so its figures ran the right way for me to read them. It hardly needed to have bothered. I'm so used to mirror - image writing that I read it as well as the other land. Maybe learning Hebrew helped get my eyes used to moving from right to left.