“About eight hundred yards as the arolat flies. We take the next lift.”
They walked through the archway into the lift-well.
The spiral carrier took them up some dozens of floors.
A corridor of plush and brass.
Another corridor, with a glass wall …
Katin gasped: All Phoenix patterned below them, from central towers to fog-lapped wharf. Though the Alkane was no longer the tallest building in the galaxy, it was by far the tallest in Phoenix.
A ramp curved into the building’s heart. Along the marbled wall hung the seventeen canvases in the Dehay sequence, Under Sirius.
“Are these the …?”
“Nyles Folvin’s molecular-reproduction forgeries, done in twenty-eight hundred at Vega. For a long time they were more famous than the originals—which are downstairs on display in the South Green Chamber. But there’s so much history connected with the forgeries Bunny decided to hang them here.”
And a door.
“Here we are.”
It opened on darkness.
“Now, nephew of mine—” as they stepped inside, three shafts of light fell from someplace high to circle them on the black carpet—“would you be so good as to explain to me why you are back? And what is all this business with Prince?” She turned to face Lorq.
“Cyana, I want another nova.”
“You what?”
“You know the first expedition had to be abandoned. I’m going to try again. No special ship is needed. We learned that last time. It’s a new crew; and new tactics.” The spotlights followed them across the carpet.
“But Lorq—”
“Before, there was meticulous planning, movements oiled, meshed, propelled by confidence in our own precision. Now we’re a desperate bunch of dock-rats, with a Mouse among us; and the only thing that propels us is my outrage. But that’s a terrible thing to flee, Cyana.”
“Lorq, you just can’t go off and repeat—”
“The captain is different too, Cyana. Before, the Roc flew under half a man, a man who’d only known victory. Now I’m a whole man. I know defeat as well.”
“But what do you want me—”
“There was another star under study by the Alkane that was near the point of nova. I want the name and when it’s likely to go off.”
“You’re just going to go like that? And what about Prince? Does he know why you’re going to the nova?”
“I couldn’t care less. Name my star, Cyana.”
Uncertainty troubled her gauntness. She touched something on her silver bracelet.
New light:
Rising from the floor was a bank of instruments. She sat on the bench that rose too and looked over the indicator lights. “I don’t know if I’m doing right, Lorq. Outrage? If the decision did not so much affect my life as well as yours, it would be easier for me to give it in the spirit you demand. Aaron was responsible for my curatorship.”
She touched the board, and above them appeared—
“Till now I have always been as welcome in Aaron Red’s home as I was in my own brother’s. But the machine has worked round to a point where this may no longer be. You have placed me in this position: of having to make a decision that ends a time of great comfort for me.”
—appeared the stars.
Katin suddenly realized the chamber’s size. Some fifty feet across, massed from points of light, hung a hologramic projection of the galaxy, turning.
“We have several study expeditions out now. The nova that you missed was there.” She touched a button and one star among the billions flared—so brightly Katin’s eyes narrowed. It faded, and again the whole domed siderium was ghosted with starlight. “At present we have an expedition attending a buildup—”
She stopped.
She reached out, and opened a small drawer.
“Lorq, I really am troubled by this whole business—”
“Go on, Cyana. I want the star’s name. I want a tape of its galactic coordinates. I want my sun.”
“And I’ll do all I can to give it to you. But you must indulge the old woman first.” From the drawer she took—Katin formed a small surprise-sound in the back of his mouth, then swallowed it—a deck of cards. “I want to see what guidance the Tarot gives.”
“I’ve already had my cards read for this undertaking. If they can tell me a set of galactic coordinates, fine. Otherwise, I have no time for them.”
“Your mother was from Earth and always harbored the Earth-man’s vague distrust of mysticism, even though she admitted its efficacy intellectually. I hope you take after your father.”
“Cyana, I’ve already had one complete reading. There’s nothing that a second one can tell me.”
She fanned the cards facedown. “Perhaps there’s something it can tell me. Besides, I don’t want to do a complete reading. Just pick one.”
Katin watched the captain draw, and wondered if the cards had prepared her for that bloody noon on Chronaiki Plaza a quarter of a century ago.
The deck was not the common 3-D dioramic type that Tyÿ owned. The figures were drawn. The cards were yellow. It could easily have dated from the seventeenth century or before.
On Lorq’s card a nude corpse hung from a tree by a rope tied to the ankle.
“The Hanged-man.” She closed the deck. “Reversed. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“Doesn’t the Hanged-man imply a great spiritual wisdom is coming, Cyana?”
“Reversed,” she reminded him. “It will be achieved at great price.” She took the card and put it, with the rest of the deck, back in the drawer. “These are the coordinates of the star you want.” She pressed another button.
A ribbon of paper fed into her palm. Tiny metal teeth chomped it. She held it up to read. “The coordinates are all there. We’ve had it under observation two years. You’re in luck. The blowup date has been predicted at between ten and fifteen days off.”
“Fine.” Lorq took the tape. “Come on, Katin.”
“What about Prince, Captain?”
Cyana rose from the bench. “Don’t you want to see your message?”
Lorq paused. “Go on. Play it.” And Katin saw something come alive in Lorq’s face. He walked over to the console as Cyana Morgan searched the message index.
“Here it is.” She pressed a button.
Across the room Prince turned to face them. “Just what the hell—” his black-gloved hand struck a crystal beaker, as well as its embossed dish, from the table—“do you think you’re doing, Lorq?” The hand came back; the dagger and the carved wooden stick clattered to the floor from the other side. “Cyana, you’re helping too, aren’t you? You are a traitorous bitch. I am angry. I am furious! I am Prince Red—I am Draco! I am a crippled Serpent; but I’ll strangle you!” The damask tablecloth crumpled in black fingers; and the sound of the wood beneath, splintering.
Katin swallowed his shock a second time.
The message was a 3-D projection. An out-of-focus window behind Prince threw light from some sun’s morning—probably Sol’s—across a smashed breakfast.
“I can do anything, anything I want. You’re trying to stop that.” He leaned across the table.
Katin looked at Lorq, at Cyana Morgan.
Her hand, pale and veined, clamped brocade.
Lorq’s, ridged and knot-knuckled, lay on the instrument bank; two fingers held a toggle.
“You’ve insulted me, Lorq. I can be truly vicious, simply out of caprice. Do you remember that party where I was forced to break your head to teach you manners? You probably don’t even remember the boy you brought along with you—uninvited, I may add—to my little affair. His name was Brian Anthony Sanders—a commonplace, boorish, stupid, and insufferably rude young man. Before we were even introduced, he made some insulting comment about my arm. I laughed it off, as I had learned to do. I even responded politely—answered his boorish questions, as though they were of no consequence. But I never forgot them. After the party, when he r
eturned to his university, he found his scholarship canceled and a charge of cheating on his previous term’s finals leveled against him, for which, I’m pleased to say, he was shortly expelled. Five years later—because I still had not forgotten—I had an accountant visit the firm where he was then working. A week later he was fired for embezzling some few paltry thousands of pounds @sg from his employers—and actually spent three years incarcerated at hard labor for it, where, I gather, he regularly protested his innocence till he became the laughingstock of the other prisoners. Five years after that—by then he wasn’t doing very well, as I recall (you probably remember him as a rather stocky boy; he’d become a very gaunt man)—when I had my people hunt him out once more, it was not difficult to have some minor drugs secreted in his room in the single-men’s complex where he was now living—so that he was put out onto the street. Two years after that, when I decided to devote still another hour to seeing what I could do to tarnish the quality of his life, I discovered that he was still without a home—and had developed a serious drinking problem. A couple of particular ironies there: When we found him—in a ditch just below the highway that led to some storage hangars behind the space field—he was sleeping in a corrugated crate that had once been used to deliver a Red-shift manufactured intra-atmospheric turbine coupler. And somewhere, in some accident or other over the intervening time, he’d lost three fingers off his left hand—that, believe me, I had nothing to do with. But by then he simply didn’t have what it took to go and get them replaced. It wasn’t too hard, at that point, to shift his interests toward exactly those drugs that had made him homeless in the first place—a young woman in my employ took him into a real apartment for a month, plied him with the drugs daily at very high dosages … then disappeared, leaving him back on the street with only his habit to remember her by. The last time I checked—only three months back, actually—I learned that, after a colorful and recidivist penal career, trying to support that habit, Brian Anthony Sanders died … not a full year ago, of exposure to the cold in a dead-end alley of an inconsequential city of a few million folk on an icy world thousands of light-years from either yours or mine, doubtless cursing the gods of chance that had thwarted all his attempts to give himself a happy life—as though somehow he were just particularly allergic to the … bad luck plaguing him. Knowing I was a persistent, niggling factor in that plague is a wonderfully invigorating feeling, Lorq. Really, it’s something everyone has envisioned—making the rude and the thoughtless pay for their thoughtlessness for the rest of their lives. Well, I just happen to have been born powerful enough to do it. I assure you, it feels exactly as good as you might ever have imagined. Altogether, it took me no more than five hours, spread out over a decade. In my more grandiose moments, however, I feel safe in saying … I killed him! I’ve done this, you understand, with a double-dozen who, over the years, have annoyed me the way he did. It’s not even that costly—and very satisfactory. Now, know this, Lorq Von Ray: Your existence is an insult to me. I am going to devote myself to gaining reparation for that insult. I’m prepared to spend much more time, over a much briefer period, killing you!”
Cyana Morgan looked suddenly at her nephew, saw his hand on the toggle. “Lorq! What are you doing—?” She seized his wrist; but he seized hers and pushed her hand from his.
“I know a lot more about you than I did the last time I sent a message to you,” Prince said from the table.
“Lorq, take your hand off that switch!” Cyana insisted. “Lorq …” Frustration cracked her voice.
“The last time I spoke to you, I told you I was going to stop you. Now, I tell you that if I have to kill you to stop you, I will. The next time I speak to you …” His gloved hand pointed. His forefinger quivered …
As Prince flickered out, Cyana struck Lorq’s hand away. The toggle clicked off. “Just what do you call yourself doing?”
“Captain …?”
Under wheeling stars Lorq’s laughter answered.
Cyana spoke angrily: “You sent Prince’s message through the public announcement system! That blasphemous madman was just seen on every screen throughout the institute!” In anger she struck the response plate.
Indicator lights dimmed.
Bank and bench fell into the floor.
“Thank you, Cyana. I’ve got what I came for.”
A museum guard burst into the office. A shaft of light lit him as he came through the door. “Excuse me, I’m terribly sorry, but there was—oh, just a moment.” He punched his wrist com-kit. “Cyana, have you gone and flipped your silver wig?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Bunny. It was an accident!”
“An accident! That was Prince Red, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was. Look, Bunny—”
Lorq clasped Katin’s shoulder. “Come on.”
They left the guard/Bunny arguing with Cyana.
“Why …?” Katin tried to ask around the captain’s shoulder.
Lorq stopped.
Under Sirius #11 (Folvin forgery) flared in purple cascade behind his shoulder. “I said I couldn’t tell you what I meant. Perhaps this shows you a little. We’ll get the others now.”
“How will you find them? They’re still wandering around the museum.”
“You think so?” Lorq started again.
The lower galleries were chaos.
“Captain …” Katin tried to picture the thousands of tourists confronted with Prince’s vehemence; he remembered his initial confrontation on the Roc.
Visitors swarmed the onyx floor of the FitzGerald Salon. (“If that’s their idea of a new artwork—”
(“—to present it like that with no announcement I don’t think was very—”
(“—but it looked pretty real to we!”) The iridescent allegories of the twentieth-century genius glazed the vaulted walls with light. Children chattered to their parents. Students pattered to one another. Lorq strode between them with Katin close after.
They spiraled out into the lobby above the dragon’s head.
A black thing flapped over the crowd, was jerked back. “The others must be with him,” Katin cried, pointing to Sebastian.
Katin swung around the stone jaw. Lorq overtook him on the blue tile.
“Captain, we just saw—”
“—Prince Red, like on the ship—”
“—on the announcement screens, it was—”
“—was all over the museum. We got back—”
“—here so we wouldn’t miss you—”
“—when you came down. Captain, what—”
“Let’s go.” Lorq stopped the twins with a hand on each of their shoulders. “Sebastian! Tyÿ! We have to get back to the wharf and get the Mouse.”
“And get off this world and to your nova!”
“Let’s just get to the wharf first. Then we’ll talk about where we’re going next.”
They pushed their way toward the arch.
“I guess we’ve got to hurry up before Prince gets here,” Katin said.
“Why?”
That was Lorq.
Katin tried to translate his visage.
It was indecipherable.
“I have a third message coming. I am going to wait for it.”
Then the garden: boisterous and golden.
“Thanks, doc!” Alex called. He kneaded his arm: a fist, a flex, a swing. “Hey, kid.” He turned to the Mouse. “You know, you really can play that syrynx. Sorry about the medico-unit coming in right in the middle of things. But thanks anyway.” He grinned, then looked at the wall clock. “Guess I’ll make my run after all. Malakas!” He strode down among the clinking veils.
Leo asked sadly, “Now you it away put?”
The Mouse pulled the sack’s drawstring and shrugged. “Maybe I’ll play some more later.” He started to stick his arm through the strap. Then his fingers fell in the leather folds. “What’s the matter, Leo?”
The fisherman stuck his left hand beneath the tarnished links of his belt. “You ju
st me very nostalgic make, boy.” The right hand now. “Because so much time passed has, that you no longer a boy are.” Leo sat down on the steps. Humor brushed his mouth. “I not here happy am, I think. Maybe time again to move is. Yeah?” He nodded. “Yeah.”
“You think so?” The Mouse turned around on his drum to face him. “Why now?”
Leo pressed his lips. The expression said about the same as a shrug. “When I the old see, I know how much the new I need. Besides, leaving for a long time I have been thinking of.”
“Where’re you going?”
“To the Pleiades I go.”
“But you’re from the Pleiades, Leo. I thought you said you want to see someplace new?”
“There a hundred-odd worlds in the Pleiades are. I maybe a dozen have fished. I something new want, yes; but also, after these twenty-five years, home.”
The Mouse watched the thick features, the pale hair: familiarity? You adjust it like you would a mist-mask, the Mouse thought; then fit it on the face that must wear it. Leo had changed so much. The Mouse, who had had so little childhood, lost some more of it now. “I just want the new, Leo. I wouldn’t want to go home … even if I had one.”
“Someday as I the Pleiades, you Earth or Draco will want.”
“Yeah.” The Mouse shrugged his sack onto his shoulder. “Maybe I will. Why shouldn’t I—in twenty-five years?”
Then, an echo:
“Mouse …!”
And:
“Hey, Mouse?”
And again:
“Mouse, are you in there?”
“Hey!” The Mouse stood and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Katin?” His shout was even uglier than his speech.
Long and curious, Katin came between the nets. “Surprise, surprise. I didn’t think I’d find you. I’ve been going down the wharf asking people if they’d seen you. Some guy said you’d been playing in here.”
“Is the captain through at the Alkane? Did he get what he wanted?”
“And then some. There was a message from Prince waiting for him at the institute. So he played it over the public announcement system.” Katin whistled. “Vicious!”
“He’s got his nova?”
“He does. Only he’s waiting around here for something else. I don’t understand it.”