But John 1:1 and its variants in other creeds are also the basis of modem information theory. Because words partake of the divine, they manifest themselves in the spiritual world as well as in our own. Properly directed - ensorceled, if you will - spirits can gather, read, manipulate, and move the essence of words without ever having to handle the physical documents on which they appear. If the Greek and Roman mages had loiown that trick, their world could have been drowning in information, just as we are now.

I didn't have to wait long; as I'd expected. Brother Vahan used only the best and most thoroughly trained spirits.

Ghostly images of documents began flashing onto the access screen, one after another - records from ten years ago.

"Hold on!" I said after a few seconds.

The spirit appeared. "I obey your instructions, child of Adam," it said, as if daring me to deny it.

"I know, I know," I told it; the last thing I wanted was to get the heart of the access system mad at me. "I don't need to look at every individual report, though. Let me have the numbers in each category for the two periods. When I know what those are, I'M examine specific documents. That way, I'll be able to see forest and trees both."

The spirit looked out at me over the tops of its spectral spectacles. "You should have no difficulty in maintaining your mental view of both categories," it said reprovingly.

That's easy for someone on the Other Side to say, but I have the usual limits of flesh and blood. I just stared back at the spirit. If it kept acting uppity, I'd sic Brother Vahan on it. After a last sniff, it said, "It shall be as you desire."

One by one, the numbers came up on the screen. The Thomas Brothers certainly did have a well-drilled scriptorium spirit; the creature wrote so its figures ran the right way for me to read them. It hardly needed to have bothered. I'm so used to mirror - image writing that I read it as well as the other land. Maybe learning Hebrew helped get my eyes used to moving from right to left.