Free Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal Page B

and stared. Three different names had been written inside.
    David Autrey
    Leopold Wesselman
    Amy Casteel
    I had heard those names in conjunction with the family. “Relatives?” I tilted the book so he could see.
    He cocked his head. “Yeah . . . my great-grandfather, granddad, and Mom.”
    I thumbed through the pages, which carried a record of the past. “This is gorgeous.”
    Wesselman’s brow crinkled. “What? Really?”
    “My clients are most excited by wabi-sabi—” I paused as the confusion on his face deepened. “It’s a Japanese term. Something that witnesses and records the graceful decay of life. See? Someone underlined ‘autocratic.’ The ink is the same green as Leopold Wesselman’s name, so he probably did the underlining. It’s a tiny peek into his thoughts.”
    “Huh.”
    I turned to page seventy-four. “That coffee stain tells us that they were probably staying up late working.”
    “Or reading it over breakfast.”
    “Exactly. The question is more interesting than the answer.” I closed it and thumbed the rough punctures on the cover. “Teeth marks. Someone had a dog. The hints are what make it so intriguing. Each piece of wear shows a part of the lifecycle of the book.”
    “Terroir.”
    “Pardon?” I looked up and to the left. Lizzie tracked my eye motion and supplied the definition.
    She whispered, “Terroir is the characteristic taste and flavor—”
    Wesselman’s answer overpowered hers and she trailed off. “It’s the unique expression of the terrain on the wine. Clone a grapevine and plant it somewhere different and the grapes change. Then the weather in a particular year changes the expression still more, so every wine is unique. Well . . . without weather control.”
    I laughed with delight. “Yes! We deal in very much the same concept, but different expressions of authentic experience.” I set the dictionary down and ran my finger over the platen of the typewriter. “My clients can print anything they want, so what they crave are things that are truly unique.”
    “How about the typewriter?” He gestured with his chin toward the machine.
    “Do you know its history?”
    “I thought that was your job.”
    Sighing, I picked up the typewriter without asking for permission. Even though I’ve handled them before, I remember being startled by how light the Corona 3 was compared to some of the desktop typewriters. “I can tell you if it’s a real typewriter, and make some guesses about the sort of use it saw, but that’s not the same as a full provenance.”
    “Well. It’s not a family piece. It belonged to a friend of my grandfather’s, but I don’t know who owend it before that.”
    “Did they werite on it?” I set it on the big library table in a puddle of golden light. The enamel on the edges of the chassis were was worn where the folding mechanism had banged into it.
    “Dunno. Before my time.”
    What I want, in a situation likke this, is a complete oral history of the object. If there is a receipt o f purchase, that’s even better. I rarely get that.
    And I have clients who don’t need it. Some of them are interested in the machine tiself and less so in the story that comes with it.
    You seem to want both.
    Or perhaps something else entirely. I can offer you a time-stamped LiveConnect record of everything I experienced up until I went off the Grid. There seems to be no need to tell you about the chipped enamel on the chassis. You can see that, well enough. Do you care that the wear pattern on the percentage symbol likely means that a previous owner worked in accounting?
    I think it most likely that what you want to know is how the typewriter relates to Johnny. So I am going to suit myself, since your wishes are opaque to me, and jump ahead to after I negotiated for the typewriter and dictionary, and began to ride home.

    One of the things I pick up when I’m on my shopping trips are Captures. You might have even bought one of mine. The one of the