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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 74: Kondor 280
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Slade 275
“C is talking to someone now,” Cameron, the receptionist, explained.
“It’s important. I’ll wait,” Kondor replied. He had been called along with Zeke to come for their next mission to C’s office. Kondor was in the building, and Zeke had been shopping at Piccadilly Circus, possibly the world’s largest open-air market/yard sale/whatever, and would be joining him soon.
“In that case, why don’t you wait in the Private Library? When he is ready, I will come fetch you.”
“A different library than the Armory and the General Library?” Kondor found himself a bit intrigued. The receptionist raised his suit-coated arm and pointed to a polished cherrywood door to his left. Kondor had thought it was just another office, but willingly enough he went in search of a distraction.
An older woman looked up from her copy of The Aeneid in Latin as she sat at the desk behind the door. Kondor waited, realizing this was not a library that just anyone, even an employee, could enter.
“Captain Kondor, welcome. If you have any questions, I will be pleased to be of any assistance I can.”
He nodded, and walked across the thick green carpet to the bookshelves. There were only a dozen of them, and most quite small–perhaps two thousand books in toto were housed in the room. He heard a grunt, and looked back to see her pointing to a slim whitewood bookcase with perhaps a hundred books. He pointed at it, and she nodded. Curious, he walked over to it as she went back to her epic poem on the founding of Rome.
The first item that caught his eye was a brass sign:
Books from Alternate Timelines.
Next was a leather bound book with a glittering cover on the top shelf. It had letters in the Cyrillic and the Roman alphabets on its cover.
“An Account of the Founding of Lunagrad in 2141 A.D. by Cosmonaut Sergei Velichev, Hero of the Soviet Union.”
“I, Verser” Italian/English/Gal One tri-language autobiography by Leonardo da Vinci. Maybe that explained why Leonardo was such a genius, and was trying to invent helicopters.
“Supersoldier in the Imperial Canadian Army, My Life as a Member of the Northern Blizzard Superstrike Force including an addendum for the 2nd Edition dealing with the Invasion of Peru,” by Anonymous.
Raising one eyebrow, he went to the next shelf down where five all slim white-covered paper books rested: “ How to Drum”; “Drum for the Soul”; “Advanced Drumming Techniques”; “A Compilation of Angelic Drumming”; “More Drum Solos”. All by Johnny Angel. This was followed by a cheap-looking book with a flashy cover, and the title “The Life and Untimely Death of Rock and Roll’s Greatest Drummer–the Angel.” A yellow post-it note was inside, and Kondor flipped it open to read the note.
“Hi, I’m Johnny Angel. I loved that world, but you can only spend a few decades faking your ‘good genetics and not taking drugs’ explanation for why you’re not aging before you have to fake a tragic death. I’m not Keith Richards after all. If you reading this are one of us, I hope to see you at a jam session sometime in another verse. Ciao. The Angel. The multiverse’s best drummer.”
Shaking his head in amusement, Kondor put the post-it note back into the book, and closed it.
The shelf below that had three softcovers that had been beaten up a bit, under the title “Tom Clancy, Insurance Investigator” with numbers two, three, and seven, by author Jack Ryan.
“Was he a verser?”
“Oh, no, a verser picked up some copies in a yard sale in some world, and took them with him. Gave them to us when he was finished,” the Librarian said. This made Kondor wonder if he should have copies made of his Sardic books to give to this library. He looked at the next, but it was in Mandarin, he thought. After that was “Casino Royale” by Ian Fleming, and an omnibus edition of the Lensmen series by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, and “Dune” by Frank Herbert. Did that mean this world had no geeks intoning ‘Dune, desert planet’ or ‘fear is the mindkiller’? Anyway, he could not read the Mandarin book, although the others he might try, perhaps to see if there was any difference between the version of Dune he remembered and this book.
The next shelf down made him smile because of the Mandarin book. “Translation Aid for Conversations in Galactic One for the English Speaker in the Imperial Legions”. Also it had “Use and Care of the Mark VII Kinetic Blaster”, and “Getting to Know your Battlemech”, and “The M-16A, How to Use it Effectively in Combat”. He flipped through the last, but it had nothing he did not already know, although the manufacturer of the rifle was a gun company he had never heard of—Sackett-L’Amour Guns Mfg. After that was a final manual of arms: “Targeting Thor’s Rods: Orbital Precision Bombardment” by Colonel Pournelle. Slade might like that just for the name of Thor, and for a moment, he wondered what his old friend was doing, and where he was doing it. Oddly, this shelf ended with “A Guide to Etiquette”.
He picked it up, and flipped through it growing increasingly curious as to what was so special about it.
“Ahem,” the librarian said from her post. “That was one-half of a book code used by one verser. He said ‘No one is ever going to steal a book on manners’.”
“A book code?”
“Oh, an old spy trick. Say one wanted to send a spy to Amsterdam, or London, Dublin, or Geneva.” She flipped through the book. “You could send a message in the clear on the radio of 8/1/1 which if you had the same book in your hand would mean go to page eight,” she flipped there and pointed to the word ‘all’ which headed that page, “and first word and first letter, and they would go to Amsterdam, and even if the enemy listened in, they would not know what 8 dash 1 dash 1 meant.”
“And you could use another page and word and so forth for the same letter and it would be very hard to figure out. Ingenious.”
She let him go back to his search.
A shelf down came a book that made him frown: “Summoning and Controlling Renegade Chaos Entities commonly and incorrectly referred to as the ‘Old Gods’ for the Advanced Practitioner in Occultic Secrets”. The next book was of a similar kind in that it was about magic: “Unmasking the Interdimensional Illuminati”. The next title made him shiver with horror at the likelihood of the design of madmen: “The Gulag Archipelago as Industrial Scale Human Sacrifice for Black Magic: An Investigation by the White Wizards Committee for Ethical Magical Procedure”. Two Grimoires and a Book of Shadows came next. A Japanese translation of the Bible was included. He skipped all this.
Kneeling to reach the bottom row, which was full, he saw books of alternate history. He gathered these were probably history books by non-versers. It might be useful to read the history of a world he went to to. He had been doing so with his book on the art of the Sardic.
“Stuart’s Coup De Main” described the end point of the Battle of Antietam with Confederate cavalry commander Jeb Stuart taking ten thousand men and capturing Washington DC and Lincoln. “Disaster in the Alps” covered failed general Hannibal Barca’s foolish attempt to take elephants over the alpine mountains in winter. “Caesar–Restorer of Morals and the Republic” was next, and then he read “Patton in Moscow, An Account of the Invasion of Russia by Patton’s Drivers”. “Tank Brothers–Rommel and Patton” was another book from a timeline where America assisted Germany in invading Russia. “The War Against the Sassoons” was in Cantonese and English, and detailed an Opium War from the viewpoint of Chinese dragonriders who outfought the Kabbalah using sorcerers of the Sassoons and the guns of the English before forcing Queen Victoria to sue for peace.
Kondor almost stopped reading there. The gullibility of some people who needed to believe in magic never ceased to amaze him. But the notion of books from other timelines was too interesting. The next title made him outright shake his head in amazement at the unexpected oddities of the Multiverse, “The Great Reformist Popes: Grace Alone. Pope Martin Luther and his Successors”. The next was absolutely relieving, a huge book with lots of cheerful pictures, and no depth of seriousness involved: “How Pumpkin Chunking Took The North American Provinces by Storm in the 2000’s”. It claimed to be written on pumpkin paper.
That was the last book on that row.
Deciding to go for an easy read, he scooped up a Jack Ryan novel, and began reading of the adventures of Tom Clancy as he sought to foil the misdeeds of attempts at insurance fraud by a gang of conmen. He was into the third chapter when Cameron and Zeke came to get him for the mission brief.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
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