Spence considered this, her pug nose wrinkled in thought, then shook her straw-colored hair. “I don’t see how. It took all of us several days to distribute those papers last time.” An idea struck her. “But Lucy, you’ve got access to the Records Office computer. Can’t you use that to send electronic copies?”

 “Only if I want the security forces to go through every line of programming on that computer until they find me,” Sula said. “There are invisible tags on every piece of mail that tells you where it came from—and of course a duplicate of every mail goes to the Office of the Censor, and you can imagine what would happen if ten thousand copies ofThe Loyalist turned up in their buffer.”

 Spence paused in her pacing, a thoughtful frown twitching at her lips. “Lucy,” she said, “you’ve got high access. Couldn’t you just tell the computer to lie about all that?”

 Sula opened her lips to make a scornful reply, then hesitated. A subtle chime came from the kitchen, and Spence limped there to take Sula’s supper from the oven. When she returned, Sula had turned to her desk and was connecting once more to the Records Office computer.

 “Eat your supper,” Spence said as she dropped the plate on Sula’s desk, over the flashing symbols that were appearing in its glowing depths. Juices sizzled faintly in Sula’s ear. She picked up the nearest skewer and ate a piece of squid. Reheating had turned the cuttlefish rubbery, but its texture, or for that matter its taste, were by now of little interest. She pushed the plate to one side as the Records Office directory appeared onscreen.

 “Make good use of the help files,” Spence advised.

 As Sula ate her supper, and later drank the sweetened coffee that Spence provided, she discovered that all the Records Office mail—minus the interoffice communications, which remained within the department—went through the same broadcast node, a heavy duty model fully capable of handling the thousands of requests for information delivered to the office every day. The node tagged every mail with its own code before sending the original to its destination, and automatically copied every mail to the Office of the Censor, where it would be subjected to a series of highly secret algorithms to determine any subversive content.