“Alaine of Lyndar?” he said. “No, I’ve never heard of him. But we can soon find who he was.”
Alvin watched with interest while he punched a set of keys on one of the machines. Almost immediately there came the glow of a synthesizer field, and a slip of paper materialized.
“Alaine seems to have been a predecessor of mine-a very long time ago. I thought I knew all the Keepers for the last hundred million years, but he must have been before that. It’s so long ago that only his name has been recorded, with no other details at all. Where was that inscription?”
“In the Tower of Loranne,” said Alvin after a moment’s hesitation.
Another set of keys was punched, but this time the field did not reappear and no paper materialized.
“What are you doing?” asked Alvin. “Where are all your records?”
The Keeper laughed.
“That always puzzles people. It would be impossible to keep written records of all the information we need: it’s recorded electrically and automatically erased after a certain time, unless there’s a special reason for preserving it. If Alaine left any message for posterity, we’ll soon discover it.”
“How?”
“There’s no one in the world who could tell you that. All I know is that this machine is an Associator. If you give it a set of facts, it will hunt through the sum total of human knowledge until it correlates them.”