The place was comfortably warm, its atmosphere carefully controlled to guard against any excess humidity that might damage the stored books. There was a smell of wood polish, chemical preservatives, and the ozone whiff of the stasis fields that protected the oldest and most fragile specimens.
Once Psullus had gone, taking with him a copy of Boydenstyre's Lives, I led Medea up the brass staircase to the upper gallery and along to the heavy door of the private reading room at the far end.
At the door, Medea paused and took a Glavian needle pistol from her pocket.
'I brought this/ she said. 'It was also my father's, one of the pair made for him.'
I knew that well enough. Medea still carried the matched pistols in combat.
'Leave it outside/ I told her. 'It's never a good idea to attempt connection through weapons. Even friendly heirlooms like that. The sting of death attaches itself to them and you'd find that unpleasant. The jacket will be fine.'
She nodded and left the gun on a bookshelf near the reading room door. We went inside and found Vance waiting for us. The small chamber was candle lit, with three chairs arranged around a cloth-covered table. The last rays of sunset were glimmering in through the stained glass skylight.
We took our seats. Vance, a tall, stooping man with kindly, tired eyes, spread Midas's cerise jacket on the tablecloth. He had already been meditating enough to put him near to the trance state, and I gently guided Medea to a receptive calmness.
The auto-seance began. It is a simple enough psychic procedure, and one which I have used many times for investigation and research. Vance was the conduit, channelling the power of the warp. I focused my own mind-strength to keep us centred. From the point of transition, the room took on a cold, frosty light. Solids became transluscent and fizzy. The dimensions of the little reading room stretched and shifted impatiently.
Midas's jacket, now a wisp of turquoise smoke, was swathed in the aura it had accumulated over time, the echoes of its contact with human hands, human minds.
Take it/1 said. Touch it/
Medea reached out her hand warily and brushed her fingers against the edge of the aura, which bloomed and fluffed up at her touch.
'Oh/ she said.
We teased apart the psychic memories clinging to that garment until we found her father. Midas Betancore, pilot, warrior, my friend. We coaxed his phantom out of hiding.
It was no ghost, just the after-image he had left behind. An impression of him, his looks, his voice, his emotions. A distant hint of his rich chuckle. The faint odour of the lho-sticks he liked to smoke and the cologne he chose to wear. We saw him young, little more than a boy. We saw him in virile middle age, just a few years from his untimely death. There, at the helm of the gun-cutter, itself now just a ghost too, the Glavian circuitry inlaid into his hands marrying him profoundly to the craft's controls. There, steering a long-prow. There, watching the suns rise over the Stilt Hills of Glavia.