"Whatever you need to tell him. ]ust remember the Nine and the One."

Deirdre's expression was thoughtful, then she nodded and looked up. "It was the autumn after I left Castle City that I first heard of the Seekers." She paced as she talked, her black biker boots beating against the stage. "I traveled to Ireland, looking for some inspiration for my music, and after that I spent some time tramping around England, Wales, and Scotland. For a week I played at a pub in Edinburgh. That was where I first met Hadrian. We talked after my set one night, and he said some amazing things about . . . possibilities.

Possibilities I've wondered about myself." She smiled. "A week later, he took me to the Seekers' Charterhouse in London."

"I was lucky to find you," Farr said. "The Seekers were lucky."

Deirdre's eyes grew distant. "I've always known there are many worlds besides our own, worlds that can sometimes draw near to this one. It's a belief both my parents gave me." Her gaze focused again on Travis. "I knew the moment I met them that I belonged with the Seekers."

"So you look for other worlds," Travis said.It was Farr who answered him. "As I said, Mr.

75. 71.

question--yes, for five centuries the Seekers have sought out, cataloged, and studied evidence of worlds other than this Earth."

Deirdre gave a wry smile. "It's not quite as glamorous as it sounds.

After I joined, I found out that most of what the Seekers do consists of reading boring old papers and entering records into a computer."

Farr glanced at her. "However, it was in doing just such boring work that you found the key to a case that had hit a dead end over a century ago."

Deirdre picked up a folder. "This file concerns a man the Seekers know as James Sarsin. We don't know what his real name is, as he's had many.

However, he went by the name of Sarsin when the Seekers first became aware of him. He was a bookseller in London at the time. This was early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth." Deirdre glanced up from the folder.

"By the way, that's Queen Elizabeth One. All of this occurred in the year 1564, but it was clear even then that the man who called himself Sarsin had been living in and around London for nearly two centuries."

Travis shook his head. "But that's--" He cut the sentence short.

Impossible was a meaningless word. Anything was possible. Hadn't he learned that well enough?

Deirdre pulled several papers from the folder. "These are copies of the deeds for Mr. Sarsin's London bookshop, dating from 1532 to 1851. If you look at them, you'll see that, every fifty years or so, the proprietor of the Queen's Shelf died, and the business was bequeathed to another individual."

Travis flipped through the pages. Reading was al- ^ys hard, and the ornate script complicated the task, but his work with runes helped him concentrate and decipher the signatures: Oliver Sarsin, Jacques ^is-Pierre, Louis Gris-Pierre. He looked up. "What's 76.SO Unneiii1 ^,T,,.