Ajax Penumbra

1969

Robin Sloan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781782395171
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782394464
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

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...

Members Only

Mohammed Al-Asmari has a posse—or at least that’s how he makes it sound, conferring with Penumbra and Corvina down on the floor of the bookstore, across the bulk of the wide desk.

“The measure of a bookstore is not its receipts, but its friends,” he says, “and here, we are rich indeed.” Penumbra sees Corvina clench his jaw just slightly; he gets the sense that Mo’s clerk wishes they had some receipts, too.

“They reside in every part of this city,” Mo continues. “Every neighborhood, every social stratum. I assure you, someone will know someone … who knows someone … who is connected to this excavation.” He divvies up the labor: “I will make the calls. Mr. Corvina, you will do the legwork. But while you are occupied … someone must take your place here.” He swivels to look at Penumbra.

“Me?”

“Are we to be collaborators in this quest or not?”

“Well. I suppose—yes. I can watch the store.”

Corvina eyes Mo darkly. “Are you going to tell him the rules?”

“Of course.” Mo draws himself up straight. “Mr. Penumbra: Please make yourself at home here. Do whatever you must to prevent the store from being ransacked, burned down, or raided by the police. Sell a few books if you can. But do not, under any circumstances, browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes.”

Penumbra peers up at the tall shelves. “They are off-limits entirely?”

“If you are called upon by a member to retrieve one, you may do so.”

“A member. I see. How does one become a member?”

Mo adjusts his glasses. “There is a way of progressing through this bookstore. Before one can become a member, one must be a customer. And—ah, wait.” He plays at recollecting: “Have you by chance … purchased a book yet, Mr. Penumbra?”

He smiles, shakes his head. “I have not.”

Mo smiles, too. “Then spend some time browsing, why don’t you? I recommend the poetry table. Have you read Brautigan? Oh, you must, you must.”

Penumbra takes Corvina’s place that night and presides over the clamor of the twenty-four-hour bookstore. He fears the long-haired throng will consider him even more hopelessly square than Corvina, but in fact, they seem to regard him as a novelty, and one by one, they wander over to chat. The customer named Coyote asks for help finding Rosemary’s Baby and then actually buys it. The woman with the portable radio inquires about Corvina, then reveals that the bushy-bearded duo orbiting the CINEMA table, George and Francis, are local filmmakers. Felix presents his now preposterously tattered copy of Dune and asks if he can trade it in for The Drowned World. Penumbra is not sure if that is part of Mo’s business model, but he says yes anyway.

Later, with the scrum at its swollen peak, a dark-eyed woman glances at Penumbra: once, twice. Then she crosses the store, a plume of smoke tracking her progress, like a little steam engine. When she draws near, Penumbra can see that she is carrying a slender joint. She holds it out toward him.

“Want some, tiger?”

“Ah—no. In fact, I do not think … you see, there are books here.”

“Oh, I’m no book-burner.”

“It would presumably be an accident.”

“No such thing as accidents, tiger.” She takes a drag. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”

“New? Ah, no. In point of fact, I am not truly here.” He means to say: I do not work here; I am just filling in. But it comes out strangely, and—

“That’s far out,” she says, nodding. “Maybe I’m not here either. Maybe you and me shouldn’t be here—together. Catch my drift?”

“I believe so, but I do not—”

“My pals are heading over to the Haight. Why don’t you boogie with us?”

“I cannot, ah, boogie. That is—I cannot leave my post. Another time, perhaps.”

She gives him a pitying smile. “Keep on trucking, then.” She sends another plume curling into the air and rejoins the crowd. Later, heading for the door, she casts one last glance in his direction, but Penumbra looks away.

Bright clear sunlight presses in through the front windows and gleams on bare floorboards; Al-Asmari’s 24-Hour Bookstore is, remarkably, empty. It is midday, and the longhairs are probably in the park, sprawled on the grass under the strange light of the daystar. The store is stuffy and overheated, unequipped for this level of thermodynamic stress; Penumbra has propped the door open with a stack of Slaughterhouse-Fives.

He is watching the shop again, waiting for Corvina’s return. The clerk has found a member with a brother-in-law who does taxes for a construction company that manages one of the BART worksites. He is schmoozing the accountant over beers at the House of Shields.

Penumbra is halfway through The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; he feels like he understands the overnight crowd better with every page. The Merry Pranksters have just encountered a group of Hells Angels when a throat is cleared, delicately. Penumbra snaps his head up, startled. Before him, several steps back from the desk, stands a young woman in a green corduroys.

“Can I—ah.” Penumbra sets his book aside. “Can I help you?”

The woman seems to be evaluating him. Penumbra is not sure how long she has been standing there. She is clutching a huge dark-bound book close to her chest.

“You’re new,” she says at last.

“I am not actually—ah.” He gives in. “Yes. I suppose I am new.”

“I can come back later.”

“No, no. I can help you.”

She takes two swift steps forward, drops the book onto the desk with a heavy whump, then retreats two steps back. “I’m done with that one.”

Penumbra tips the book up, looks at the spine. It is one of the volumes from the tall shelves.

“Of course,” he says. “So. How, er—was it?”

She is silent a moment, and he thinks she might be about to flee out the front door, but then her cool countenance cracks a little, as if she can’t quite contain herself, and in a rush, she says: “It was pretty interesting. Not as hard as I thought it would be, from the way he talked about it. Mo, I mean. It was just a homophonic substitution cipher.” She pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.”

Penumbra has no idea what she is talking about. Or what he is supposed to do now. An uncomfortable silence spreads between them.

“Anyway,” she says at last. “The next one in the sequence is … wait.” She digs in her pocket, pulls out a wrinkled piece of paper. It is covered on both sides with letters scratched out and rewritten, blanks erased and filled in, like a game of Hangman gone wrong. She reads across and down, mouthing the letters. Then she refolds the paper, stuffs it back into her pocket, and announces: “Kingslake.”

“Kingslake,” Penumbra repeats. He finds the oblong ledger that Corvina consulted on his first visit—the catalog. The entries are handwritten; many are annotated, and some are crossed out. He finds KAEL, KANE (SEE ALSO: CAIN), KEANE, KIM, KING, and then, KINGSLAKE. The catalog specifies coordinates.

“Three … twenty-three,” Penumbra reads. “Three twenty-three. Wait here, please.”

He pads back toward the tall shelves, where he finds numbered brass plaques set low, at approximately Al-Asmari-level. He follows them down to III and rolls the ladder into place, fumbling with the locking brace at the bottom.

Then he climbs. It turns out that shelf XXIII is very far from the ground. The Galvanic library has no ladders; there, they keep the books, sensibly, on many separate floors. Penumbra grips the rungs tightly and takes slow, careful steps—past V, past X, past XV and XX.

At this height, he can see the ceiling—can confirm that there is, in fact, a ceiling, not just an infinity of dark shelving. He tips his head back to get a better look. There is an image up there, a mural that covers the whole area, looking a bit like a Renaissance fresco. Piece by piece, he assembles the scene: climbers in cloaks on a steep rocky trail. Dark clouds above them, and lightning that runs like a crack through the paint. Their expressions show wide eyes and gritted teeth, but their arms are outstretched, and they clasp hands. The climbers are pulling each other along.

He lowers his gaze to find shelf XXIII and there he spies his quarry: it is as thick as a dictionary, with KINGSLAKE printed on the spine. He hooks an elbow around the ladder, then unclamps his other hand and sends it searching after the book, his longest finger stretching to reach it, wiggling in air, just catching the spine once, twice, tipping it forward, until it starts to slide under its own weight, and he knows he needs to grab it, except that he is suddenly very aware of its mass, and he is afraid that if he attaches himself to this heavy object, it might overburden him, might pull him—

The book falls.

He has time to register his carelessness, and even consider how else he might have approached this challenge, as he watches it plunge down past twenty-two lower shelves, spinning end over end, fluttering just slightly—and fall into the outstretched arms of Marcus Corvina.

Down on the floor, the young woman has a look of horror—perhaps potential co-culpability?—rising in her eyes. She accepts the book from Corvina, whispers a quiet thank-you, and darts for the door. The clerk opens the wide leather-bound book on the desk and begins to scribble there.

Penumbra approaches gingerly. “I am sorry, Marcus,” he ventures. “I should not have—”

Corvina looks up. He is smiling—only the second time Penumbra has seen that expression on his face. “I’ve dropped three books and never breathed a word to Mo. As far as I’m concerned … I didn’t see a thing.”

Penumbra nods. “Thank you.”

Corvina finishes scribbling, closes the leather-bound book, then taps it meaningfully. “It’s people like Evelyn Erdos who are the real customers, you know.”

“The real customers.”

“Yes. The real readers.” The smile has faded. “If I ran this store, I’d make it members only. I certainly wouldn’t waste any more time with the public.” He almost spits it: public.

Penumbra pauses, considering. Then he says: “Marcus … if this store were not open to the public, I would not be here now.”

Corvina furrows his brow and nods once. But he seems unswayed.

The clerk’s schmoozing has been fruitful. The member’s brother-in-law’s client, Frank Lapin, manages one of the BART worksites, and he is amenable to their undertaking; in other words, he will happily accept a bribe to look the other way while they explore the excavation.

Corvina delivers the news glumly.

“But this is a positive development, isn’t it?” Penumbra asks.

“He wants two thousand dollars,” Corvina explains. “I wish I could tell you otherwise, but we don’t have that kind of money.” He looks around the store with a sour expression. “As you might have noticed, we don’t sell many books here. A foundation in New York pays the rent … but that’s about it.”

“Do not despair yet, Marcus,” Penumbra says. “There is another benefactor we can call upon.”

Penumbra dials Langston Armitage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 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
• Note on the Author