Raymonde was the last; under her it lay dustclogged on a back drawer behind her actuarial files. She plied reams of paper with a dull efficiency that somehow only ever increased her workload, and so never had the time to wonder what was past the persnickety lock. When she was promoted to better things an archivist briefly jerried a mechanism rendered inoperable, shrugged, and piled it away to a catalogue from which it would emerge only once again.
Before her, young Aleksander of the mechanical motions pored over his predecessor’s belongings. With a lepidopterist’s precision he tumbled each file slowly in his hands and when he came to the gloss-black briefcase he spent hours trying its byzantine combinations. Weekly at lunch he would come back to it privately and see if he could not find the supplication by which that mangled clasp might be wrenched open, but he never did. In the end, from every ledger and bureau Alexander Manilov was painstakingly erased, and when he stepped out of that office for the last time, leaving its mystery behind, he was O5-8.
Briefly after the old man had it commissioned sub rosa(so the word went, though it did not go to her) it was left in repose in Anomalous Objects. There poor Julienne sorted it carefully alongside Daevite bric-a-brac and a kitten which mewed hungrily for days on end, because, unfortunately, it looked to all the world like a subliming obelisk of viridian stone. It sat undistinguished in an accumulated pile of oddity for a full month before she set it apart at the (lushly incentivised!) request of the Director. A snappily dressed secretary carried it from the office and out of her life.
The venerable Director Williams dreamt of the day he’d reopen it. When it first came to him, into it he poured the ballast of his soul: the qualities that drag a Foundation man down into the earth. With psychic scalpel he scraped away his pity, his cowardice, his restraint. Every sin-soaked step he swore was for his son, who would in time be a man. One day he knew he would rise far enough, and he would take those weaknesses up again, and make up for the childhood he had denied his Alex. Somehow he never found the moment, and when he left Lewy-riddled and quietly sullen still the latches did not turn.
Three decades later something loped through Archival Records stiltlike and starving. It took Mirabelle and Matthews and Abedzadeh and splayed them across the ceiling in slick quarters. Alexis Williams fled valiant and desperate until it cornered her with a dozenfold smile and when its limblets grasped for her she swung, because why not swing, and she could not have known that in her hands was the other half of her father’s malformed soul, but the thing with the smiles did. It, to which rifles had been like rotten straw, staggered, fell, and tried to run. But Alexis was fast in the reversal and brought what should have been her father’s love up —
And down —
And up —
And down —
Until it was over. Something clattered against the floor. The shutters, she realised, and the battered old case fell open. There was nothing inside; it had served its purpose well.