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authorities. Other volumes were ancient leather-bound tomes that looked
original. Ana winced to think what someone had paid for them, only to have
them stored in a dusty environment where the only climate control was in six
coal-burning fireplaces.
And then there was the computer. Ana's hands itched for it, but it was not a
kind she knew well and she doubted that on a strange machine she would be able
to hide her footsteps, were anyone to wonder if unauthorized persons had been
perusing its electronic innards. Reluctantly, for the time being, she left it
alone.
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Beyond the bookshelves were supply cabinets with jars and canisters, all
labelled. Ana had not done any chemistry since high school, but she could
identify that the vials of mercury and the jars of sulphur were what they
said, and the blue packages of ordinary table salt, looking peculiarly homely
and out of place, still bore their factory seals. She didn't know what
antimony, saltpeter, or half a dozen other labelled substances ought to look
like, but she could think of no real reason to doubt that they were what they
said. A large bowl contained an incongruous heap of dried half-eggshells; a
topless shoe-box sagged out under the burden of twenty or so large lead
fishing weights; and six small stoppered test-tubes held granules of what
appeared to be silver.
She searched the back of each shelf with her light, careful to move nothing.
Everything was dusty, the disused substances at the back more so, until she
got to her knees to check the contents of the very bottom shelf, and noticed a
small box, nearly hidden behind some stoneware mortars, that seemed remarkably
dust free. Taking note of its precise location, she reached in and eased it
out. It was a grocer's package of ordinary blocks of paraffin wax.
She ran a thumb thoughtfully over the cool, slightly greasy surface of the
wax block, struck by the combination of pushed-to-the-back abandonment and its
cleanliness. After a minute, she began to smile.
A useful substance, wax. Children made strange, amoeba-shaped candles on the
beach with it and handymen rubbed it onto sticking drawers. Ana's mother used
to pour a thick layer of melted wax onto the top of her jams and jellies, and
Ana could recall the childhood magic of pushing down on the round wax plug and
having the other side rise up to reveal the sweet preserves underneath. Wax
was useful, too, in molding itself around a shape, in providing weight and
bulk to a hollow core or, conversely, in obscuring whatever it surrounded.
She bent down and carefully put the box back into its original place. One of
the commoner tricks of the alchemical charlatan, according to one of Glen's
books, was to soften a lump of dirty gray wax and wrap it around a piece of
gold. When the resulting "lead" was heated in its glass alembic, the wax
burned away as black smoke, miraculously revealing a puddle of pure gold.
The word "sincere" literally translates "without wax", Ana mused, brushing
the dust from the knees of her sweats. Unadulterated. Pure. The presence
ofcere in this laboratory was very interesting.
Although she would have sworn that Steven truly believed that he himself had
actually created gold.
She glanced at her watch: nearly 4 A.M., and time to leave. She walked a last
time around the man-sized alembic in the center of the room, and suddenly knew
where she'd seen the shape before: as an aura, surrounding a meditating figure
at the end of the TRANSFORMATION mural in the dining hall.
She closed the laboratory door behind her and hurried up the steps. At the
top she paused to catch her breath, and then cautiously pulled the door open.
The hall was still dark; her straining ears could make out no noise. She
stepped out onto the platform, closed the door, and stood rigid for a long
time before she was satisfied that the hall was empty but for her. She
switched on her flashlight, retrieved the key, and used it to lock the door,
then replaced it just as she had found it, tugging the corners of the pillow
to straighten the cover. She retreated down the platforms to the shadowy floor
and out of the first set of doors into the hall's small foyer, and was just
reaching out to push open the doors to the school entranceway, when she heard
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voices. She snatched back her hand and turned to leap back into the hall
before she caught herself: to be caught in a panicky retreat would be the
worst possible thing. She lived here at Change, and if she felt like
meditating at four in the morning, so what?
Still, she couldn't quite bring herself to walk brazenly out to the voices,
and in the end it was just as well that she did not, because the two men it
was Steven, his low voice shockingly loud as he came into the entranceway did
not enter the hall. Instead, his voice faded in the direction of the school
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