Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley

flights at an airport. Code numbers were missing from beside many, indicating perhaps that they weren’t yet in residence, only awaited. In the D s, only three names, and DIRECTOR —hidden among them as though he were only another of the dead. A chamber number. I went to find it, and went in.
    The director looked more like a janitor or a night watchman, the semiretired type you often see caretaking little-visited places. He wore a brown smock like a monk’s robe, and was making coffee in a corner of his small office, out of which little business seemed to be done. He looked up startled, caught out, when I entered.
    “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t think I understand this system right.”
    “A problem?” he said. “Shouldn’t be a problem.” He looked at me a little wide-eyed and shy, hoping not to be called on for anything difficult. “Equipment’s all working?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t seem that it could be.” I described what I thought I had learned about The Park’s access concept. “That can’t be right, can it?” I said. “That access is totally random…”
    He was nodding, still wide-eyed, paying close attention.
    “Is it?” I asked.
    “Is it what?”
    “Random.”
    “Oh, yes. Yes, sure. If everything’s in working order.”
    I could think of nothing to say for a moment, watching him nod reassuringly. Then: “Why?” I asked. “I mean why is there no way at all to, to organize, to have some kind of organized access to the material?” I had begun to feel that sense of grotesque foolishness in the presence of death, as though I were haggling over Georgie’s effects. “That seems stupid, if you’ll pardon me.”
    “Oh no, oh no,” he said. “You’ve read your literature? You’ve read all your literature?”
    “Well, to tell the truth…”
    “It’s all just as described,” the director said. “I can promise you that. If there’s any problem at all…”
    “Do you mind,” I said, “if I sit down?” I smiled. He seemed so afraid of me and my complaint, of me as mourner, possibly grief-crazed and unable to grasp the simple limits of his responsibilities to me, that he needed soothing himself. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I said. “I just don’t think I understand. I’m kind of dumb about these things.”
    “Sure. Sure. Sure.” He regretfully put away his coffee makings and sat behind his desk, lacing his fingers together like a consultant. “People get a lot of satisfaction out of the access here,” he said, “a lot of comfort, if they take it in the right spirit.” He tried a smile. I wondered what qualifications he had had to show to get this job. “The random part. Now, it’s all in the literature. There’s the legal aspect—you’re not a lawyer are you, no, no, sure, no offense. You see, the material here isn’t for anything, except, well,except for communing. But suppose the stuff were programmed, searchable. Suppose there was a problem about taxes or inheritance or so on. There could be subpoenas, lawyers all over the place, destroying the memorial concept completely.”
    I really hadn’t thought of that. Built-in randomness saved past lives from being searched in any systematic way. And no doubt saved The Park from being in the records business and at the wrong end of a lot of suits. “You’d have to watch the whole eight thousand hours,” I said, “and even if you found what you were looking for there’d be no way to replay it. It would have gone by.” It would slide into the random past even as you watched it, like that afternoon in Ibiza, that party in Paris. Lost.
    He smiled and nodded. I smiled and nodded.
    “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “They didn’t predict that. The randomness. It was a side effect, an effect of the storage process. Just luck.” His grin turned down, his brows knitted seriously. “See, we’re storing here at the molecular level. We have to go that small, for space problems. I