Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1)

by Robin Sloan

At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.

Penumbra blinked once, then nodded and tottered over to the desk set beside the front door. It was a massive block of dark-whorled wood, a solid fortress on the forest’s edge. You could probably defend it for days in the event of a siege from the shelves.

They show the front of the store in pen and ink—a fine-lined design so old and uncool that it’s become cool again

I know what you’re thinking: dozens of nights alone, and you’ve never cracked a cover? No, I haven’t. For all I know, Penumbra has a camera somewhere. If I sneak a peek and he finds out, I’m fired. My friends are dropping like flies out there; whole industries, whole parts of the country, are shutting down. I don’t want to live in a tent. I need this job.

“You must keep precise records of all transactions. The time. The customer’s appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on.” I guess under normal circumstances this would feel like a creepy job requirement. Under the actual circumstances—lending strange books to stranger scholars in the middle of the night—it feels perfectly appropriate.

I’m convinced his brain simply works on a different time scale. I can barely remember what I ate for lunch yesterday; Oliver, on the other hand, is casually aware of what was happening in 1000 B.C. and what it all looked like. This makes me jealous. Right now, Oliver Grone and I are peers: we have exactly the same job and sit in exactly the same chair. But soon, very soon, he will advance by one very significant degree and accelerate away from me. He will find a place in the real world, because he’s good at something—something other than climbing ladders in a lonely bookstore.

“I was hoping it would be an encyclopedia of dark rituals,” Mat says. The two-page spread shows a solid matrix of letters, a blanket of glyphs with hardly a trace of white space. The letters are big and bold, punched onto the paper in a sharp serif. I recognize the alphabet—it’s roman, which is to say, normal—but not the words. Actually, there aren’t really words at all. The pages are just long runs of letters—an undifferentiated jumble. “Then again,” Mat says, “we have no way of knowing it’s not an encyclopedia of dark rituals…”

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.

Lately, even the Waybacklist borrowers seem to be missing. Have they been seduced by some other book club on the other side of town? Have they all bought Kindles? I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!—but come on, I have a lot of free first chapters to get through. My Kindle is a hand-me-down from my dad, one of the original models, a slanted, asymmetrical plate with a tiny gray screen and a bed of angled keys. It looks like a prop from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are newer Kindles with bigger screens and subtler industrial design, but this one is like Penumbra’s postcards: so uncool it’s cool again.

He smiles at that—then something occurs to him, and he narrows his eyes. “I do not suppose you have a … Kindle?” Uh-oh. It feels like it’s the principal asking me if I have weed in my backpack. But in a friendly way, like maybe he wants to share it. As it happens, I do have my Kindle. I pull it out of my messenger bag. It’s a bit battered, with wide scratches across the back and stray pen marks near the bottom of the screen. Penumbra holds it aloft and frowns. It’s blank. I reach up and pinch the corner and it comes to life. He sucks in a sharp breath, and the pale gray rectangle reflects in his bright blue eyes. “Remarkable,” he says. “And to think I was still impressed by this species”—he nods to the Mac Plus—“of magic mirror.”

“I can make a perfect replica,” he says. “Not a problem, Jannon. Just bring me reference images.” “But you can’t copy every page, can you?” “Just the outside. The covers, the spine.” “What happens when Penumbra opens the perfect replica?” “He won’t. You said this is, like, from the archives, right?” “Right—” “So it’s the surface that matters. People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they’ll believe you.” Coming from the special-effects wizard, this is not unconvincing.

I’ve left the current logbook up on the desk. I’ll do that from now on. I mean, why put it on the shelf all the time? Sounds like a recipe for back strain if you ask me. With luck, this choice will catch on and cast a new shadow of normalcy in which I can crouch and hide. That’s what spies do, right? They walk to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread every day—perfectly normal—until one day they buy a loaf of uranium instead.

Did you write Rosemary Lappin's entry in it?

Back at NewBagel, when I designed menus and posters and (may I remind you) an award-winning logo, I learned all about the digital font marketplace. Nowhere else is the bucks-to-bytes ratio so severe. Here’s what I mean: An e-book costs about ten dollars, right? And it’s usually about a megabyte’s worth of text. (For the record, you download more data than that every time you look at Facebook.) With an e-book, you can see what you paid for: the words, the paragraphs, the possibly boring expositions of digital marketplaces. Well, it turns out a digital font is also about a megabyte, but a digital font costs not tens of dollars but hundreds, sometimes thousands, and it’s abstract, basically invisible—a thin envelope of math describing tiny letterforms. The whole arrangement offends most people’s consumer instincts. So of course people try to pirate fonts. I am not one of those people. I took a typography course in school and for our final project, everyone had to design their own typeface. I had grand aspirations for mine—it was called Telemach—but there were just too many letters to draw. I couldn’t finish it in time. It ended up capitals-only, suitable for shouty posters and stone tablets. So trust me, I know how much sweat goes into those shapes. Typographers are designers; designers are my people; I am committed to supporting them. But now FontShop.com tells me that Gerritszoon Display, distributed by FLC Type Foundry of New York City, costs $3,989. So of course I will tr...

“I mean, once we’ve got everything scanned, and cheap reading devices are ubiquitous … nobody’s going to need bookstores, right?” “Is that the business model for this?” I say, nodding at the scanner. “Selling e-books?”

That's not necessarily true. Ebooks are convenient, but physical copies of books also have advantages unique to them. As Penumbra pointed out earlier, the kindle requires battery (and repeated recharging) to operate, even when there's nothing wrong with it. The vast majority of people that I've seen in multiple book groups whenever the ebook vs physical copy issue pops up read both. To quote Steven Fry: books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

“I see it now. You cheated—would that be fair to say? And as a result, you have no idea what you have accomplished.” I look down at the desk. That would be fair to say. When I look back up at Penumbra, his gaze has softened. “And yet … you did it all the same.” He turns and wanders into the Waybacklist. “How curious.”

Her home is the burrow of a bibliophile hobbit—low-ceilinged, close-walled, and brimming over with books.

This cult seems like it might have been designed specifically to prey on bookish old people—Scientology for scholarly seniors.

“This is too interesting not to pursue. What’s the alternative? Find another job and spend forever wondering what happened to your old boss?” “Well, that’s definitely plan B—”

I tell Neel what has emerged. I explain it like the setup for a Rockets & Warlocks adventure: the backstory, the characters, the quest before us. The party is forming, I say: I have a rogue (that’s me) and a wizard (that’s Kat). Now I need a warrior. (Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?)

“My friends, I have a proposal for you. But you will need to understand something of this fellowship first. You have followed me to its home, but you do not know anything of its purpose—or have your computers told you that, too?” Well, I know it involves libraries and novices and people getting bound and books getting burned, but none of it makes any sense. Kat and Neel only know what they’ve seen on my laptop screen: a sequence of lights making their way through the shelves of a strange bookstore. When you search for “unbroken spine,” Google replies: Did you mean: unicorn sprinkle? So the correct answer is: “No. Nothing.”

“First, I will tell you just a little of our history. Then, to understand, you must see the Reading Room. There, my proposal will become clear, and I dearly hope you will accept it.” Of course we’ll accept it. That’s what you do on a quest. You listen to the old wizard’s problem and then you promise to help him.

“We, the students of Manutius, have worked for centuries to unlock his codex vitae. We believe it contains all the secrets he discovered in his study of the ancients—first among them, the secret to eternal life.” Rain spatters on the window. Penumbra takes a deep breath. “We believe that when this secret is finally unlocked, every member of the Unbroken Spine who ever lived … will live again.” A messiah, a first disciple, and a rapture. Check, check, and double-check. Penumbra is, right now, teetering right on the boundary between charmingly weird old guy and disturbingly weird old guy. Two things tip the scales toward charm: First, his wry smile, which is not the smile of the disturbed, and micromuscles don’t lie. Second, the look in Kat’s eyes. She’s enthralled. I guess people believe weirder things than this, right? Presidents and popes believe weirder things than this.

“Edgar was a clerk in San Francisco just like you, my boy.” I feel a little whirl of dislocation—the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected. Have I read Deckle’s slanty handwriting in the logbook? Did he work the late shift? Deckle brightens, too, then goes mock-serious: “Piece of advice. One night, you’re going to get curious and wonder if maybe you should check out the club next door.” He pauses. “Don’t do it.” Yes, he definitely worked the late shift.

“We use our logbook,” he says to me, “to be sure that Fedorov has earned his knowledge.” Penumbra cocks an eyebrow. “We must be sure he understands what he has accomplished.” Right. They have to be sure he didn’t just feed a bunch of books into a scanner.

“Sir, this is not how the fellowship works.” So it was Edgar Deckle who built the bookstore’s database. I feel a surge of clerkly affection. We’ve both laid our fingers on the same short, clackety keyboard. Penumbra shakes his head. “It only seems strange because we are stuck, my boy,” he says. “Corvina has held us frozen. The First Reader has not been true to the spirit of Manutius.” His eyes are like blue laser beams and he jabs a long finger down into the magnetic-tape table. “He was an entrepreneur, Edgar!”

Is this how all schisms start? Huddled circles, whispered sales pitches?

“I just don’t get it,” she says, twisting back around to look up at me. “How can you stand it that our lives are so short? They’re so short, Clay.” To be honest, my life has exhibited many strange and sometimes troubling characteristics, but shortness is not one of them. It feels like an eternity since I started school and a techno-social epoch since I moved to San Francisco. My phone couldn’t even connect to the internet back then.

Then the lights come on. I’m blinded and stricken, blinking and panicking. What just happened? Did I set off an alarm? Did I trigger some trap laid for overreaching rogues? I claw my phone out of my pocket and swipe madly at the screen, bringing it back to life. It’s almost eight in the morning. How did this happen? How long was I circumnavigating the shelves here? How long was I scanning PENVMBRA?

You...didn't bother to SET AN ALARM for your super secret book heist?! You - and everybody else - are fucking screwed.

I think for a moment about following them, but quickly reconsider. Right now my only hope is to blend in completely—to crouch in this shadow, not of normalcy, but of deep strangeness.

I try to appear as unconcerned and uninvolved as possible. Mostly this involves looking at my shoes.

“Do not take your work for granted,” he says more gently, “whether you are bound or unbound. We must be disciplined. We must be determined. We cannot allow ourselves to be”—he pauses here—“distracted.” He takes a breath. He could be a presidential candidate—a good one—stumping with total conviction and sincerity. “It is the text that matters, brothers and sisters. Remember this. Everything we need is already here in the text. As long as we have that, and as long as we have our minds”—he raises a finger and taps his sleek forehead—“we don’t need anything else.”

“How was New York?” Ashley asks politely. I’m not sure how to respond. Something like: Well, the mustachioed master of the secret library is going to be pissed that I copied the entirety of his ancient codebook and delivered it to Google, but at least I got to stay at a nice hotel? Instead, I say, “New York was good.”

The characters are appealing archetypes: Fernwen the scholarly dwarf is the everynerd, doing his best to live through the adventure. Telemach Half-Blood is the hero you wish you could be. He always has a plan, always has a solution, always has secret allies that he can call upon—pirates and sorcerers whose allegiance he earned with long-ago sacrifices.

The Golden Horn of Griffo. Huh. Griffo, like Griffo Gerritszoon. I open my laptop and start taking notes. The passage continues: “The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought,” Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach’s treasure. “And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here—none that I can detect.” Fernwen’s eyes widened at that. Hadn’t they just braved a swamp of horrors to reclaim this enchanted trumpet? And now the First Wizard claimed it carried no real power at all? “Magic is not the only power in this world,” the old mage said gently, handing the horn back to its royal owner. “Griffo made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs. I wish that I could do the same.”

Books: boring. Codes: awesome. These are the people who are running the internet.

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we’re penciling it in for a Friday morning.

“I thought there was something strange going on,” he said quietly, “but I always figured it was drugs.” “Holy shit, Oliver! What?” “Well, yeah,” he said. “I thought maybe some of those books were full of cocaine.” “And you never bothered to mention this?” “It was just a theory.”

These days, the phone only carries bad news. It’s all “your student loan is past due” and “your uncle Chris is in the hospital.” If it’s anything fun or exciting, like an invitation to a party or a secret project in the works, it will come through the internet.

He’s using my first name a lot. Mostly it’s salesmen who do that.

I’m presented, for a moment, with a nicely framed portrait: compact curled-up Mat, sweating, holding his camera up to his eye, and big broad Neel, smiling, holding the light steady, slurping his kale juice. My friends, making something together. This requires faith, too. I can’t tell what this poster board is doing, but I trust Mat. I know it’s going to be beautiful. Corvina’s got it wrong. Penumbra’s schemes didn’t fail because he’s a hopeless crackpot. If Corvina’s right, it means nobody should ever try anything new and risky. Maybe Penumbra’s schemes failed because he didn’t have enough help. Maybe he didn’t have a Mat or a Neel, an Ashley or a Kat—until now. Corvina said: You must stop Penumbra. No, just the opposite. We’re going to help him.

I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say, it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes:

“The Golden Horn of Griffo is finely wrought,” Zenodotus said, tracing his finger along the curve of Telemach’s treasure. “And the magic is in its making alone. Do you understand? There is no sorcery here—none that I can detect.” Moffat’s Zenodotus voice is not what I expected. Instead of a rich, dramatic wizard’s rumble, it’s clipped and clinical. It’s the voice of a corporate magic consultant. Fernwen’s eyes widened at that. Hadn’t they just braved a swamp of horrors to reclaim this enchanted trumpet? And now the First Wizard claimed it carried no real power at all? “Magic is not the only power in this world,” the old mage said gently, handing the horn back to its royal owner. “Griffo made an instrument so perfect that even the dead must rise to hear its call. He made it with his hands, without spells or dragon-songs. I wish that I could do the same.”

If I had to guess Moffat decoded the Manutius’s book and found that there was nothing there; that's why he took his codex vitae back and published it as the third volume of the Dragonsong Chronicles. He knew that the order was founded on, at best, an hilarious exaggeration and, at worst, a lie. It also seems pretty likely that Corvina also decoded the book, and that's why he insisted Clay put a stop the Great Decoding. He knew there was nothing to find, and he knew that would be a crushing emotional blow to Penumbra, a true believer.

“Corvina took some heat. People were angry.” “Don’t worry, he did his best to stop it.” “Oh, no—no. They were angry we hadn’t tried it already ourselves. ‘This upstart Google shouldn’t have all the fun,’ they said.” That makes me smile. Maybe Corvina’s rule isn’t as absolute as it seems. “But you’re still at it?” I ask. “Even though Google’s mighty computers didn’t find anything?” Deckle says. “Sure. I mean, come on. I have a computer.” He flicks a finger against the lid of his laptop and it makes the camera wobble. “They’re not magic. They’re only as capable as their programmers, right?”

“Seriously?” Deckle smiles. “Yes, seriously. I know they might be at the bottom of a dump somewhere. But it’s also possible”—his eyes glint—“that they’re hiding in plain sight.” Little bits of metal, lost a hundred years ago. It would probably be easier to go looking for Penumbra door-to-door.

“Drop me a line when you find them. Festina lente.” He smiles and the feed cuts to black. Okay, now I’m angry. I’d expected Deckle to help me. Instead, he’s giving me homework. Impossible homework.

“So. I should tell you. There are really two kinds of objects in the world. This is going to sound sort of spacey, but … some things have an aura. Others don’t.” Well, I’m banking on aura. “We’re talking about one of the key assets of a centuries-old cult here.” He nods. “That’s good. Everyday objects … household objects? They’re gone.” He snaps his fingers: poof. “We’re really lucky when we find, like, an awesome salad bowl. But religious objects? You would not believe how many ceremonial urns are still hanging around. Nobody wants to be the guy to throw away the urn.”

“So if I’m lucky, nobody wanted to be the guy to throw away Gerritszoon, either.” “Yep, and if somebody stole it, that’s a good sign. Getting stolen is one of the best things that can happen to an object. Stolen stuff recirculates. Stays out of the ground.”

Oliver introduced us with an email and explained to Tabitha that I am on a special mission that he looks kindly upon. He also relayed to me the tactical advice that a donation wouldn’t hurt. Unfortunately, any reasonable donation would constitute at least 20 percent of my worldly wealth, but I still have a patron, so I replied to Tabitha and told her I might have a thousand dollars to pass along (courtesy of the Neel Shah Foundation for Women in the Arts)—if she can help me out.

“Found it yet?” I shake my head. No, I have not found it yet. It’s not in 15TH CENTURY. Well, maybe it is in 15TH CENTURY, but everything else is in 15TH CENTURY, too—that’s the problem. I’m still stuck looking for a needle in a haystack. Probably an ancient Song Dynasty haystack that the Mongols burned along with everything else.

A first-grader with bright red hair runs up to the front desk, giggling and choking herself with a tangle of green yarn. Um—nice scarf? She grins and jumps up and down. “Hi there,” I say. “Let me ask you a question.” She giggles and nods. “How would you find a needle in a haystack?” The first-grader pauses, pensive, tugging on the green yarn around her neck. She’s really thinking this over. Tiny gears are turning; she’s twisting her fingers together, pondering. It’s cute. Finally, she looks up and says gravely, “I would ask the hays to find it.” Then she makes a quiet banshee whine and bounces away on one foot. An ancient Song Dynasty gong thunders in my head. Yes, of course. She’s a genius! Giggling to myself, I pound the escape key until I’m free of the terminal’s awful taxonomy. Instead, I choose the command that says, simply, ACCESSION. It’s so simple. Of course, of course. The first-grader is right. It’s easy to find a needle in a haystack! Ask the hays to find it! The accession form is long and complicated, but I race through it: CREATOR: Griffo Gerritszoon YEAR: 1500 (approx.) DESCRIPTION: Metal type. Gerritszoon punches. Full font. PROVENANCE: Lost ca. 1900. Recovered via anonymous gift.