The Dark Lady Read online

  “Hector Rayburn is my peer. The manager of the Claiborne Galleries is Tai Chong.”

  “Madame Chong,” he repeated grimly. “I know all about her.”

  “She is very knowledgeable.”

  “She's also a bleeding-heart alien-lover who sometimes forgets which race she belongs to.”

  “You must not speak of my Great Lady like that!” I said as firmly as I could.

  “Ah!” he said with a smile. “So you've got some spunk after all! Let me give you a little advice, Leonardo— save it for yourself and don't waste it on her. She's what I call a weekend bleeding heart, and that's the worst kind of all.”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “Madame Chong's the type who'll run out to one of your worlds on a weekend and march up and down the streets with you demanding whatever the hell it is you people demand— but comes Monday morning, when the Navy moves in and starts breaking open heads, she's back on Far London feeling like a fulfilled person and wondering who she can help liberate next weekend.”

  “I will listen no further to such things!” I protested, my color fluctuating wildly. “My Great Lady has been kind and considerate to me in every way.”

  “You can't put kindness in your bank account, or send it off to your House. I'm giving you coin of the realm— and nobody tells me what to say in my own home.”

  I could think of no reply, and so I remained silent.

  “All right,” he said with an air of finality. “That's settled.”

  “When am I to begin?” I asked at last.

  “You've already started.”

  “But I must get Madame Chong's permission.”

  “I'll take care of it,” he said.

  “But— ”

  “Are you questioning my word?” he demanded ominously.

  “No, Mr. Abercrombie,” I said with a sigh of resignation. “Where shall I work?”

  “Wherever you have to. If you need the library, use it. If you have to fly to the Albion Cluster, go there. If you need to buy something, buy it. Have everything billed to me. I'll call my bank and clear your name and ID with them.”

  “And if I want to study your collection?”

  “I'll instruct the robots to let you in any time of the night or day— but only to see the collection. The rest of the house is off limits to you. Is that clearly understood?”

  “Yes, Mr. Abercrombie.”

  “And one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “There was a man called Venzia who went up to 350,000 credits for the Kilcullen painting the other night, and would have gone a lot higher if he hadn't messed up his credit deposit. See if you can find out why.”

  “Possibly he, too, is enamored of the model's face,” I suggested.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Might I ask why?”

  “Because I haven't made any attempt to keep my purchases a secret, and he's never yet made me an offer for any of my artwork.”

  “I will look into the matter, Mr. Abercrombie,” I said.

  “See that you do,” he said, dismissing me.

  And this was how I left the employ of Tai Chong, who felt compassion for all races, and joined the service of Malcolm Abercrombie, who disliked all races equally— including, I suspected, his own.

  4.

  My Dear Pattern Mother:

  Much has happened in the six weeks that I have been in the employ of Mr. Malcolm Abercrombie, and now that I am once again on Far London, I shall relate the details to you.

  But first I think I should tell you about Mr. Abercrombie himself, since you expressed some dismay about my entering his employ, based on my first description of him.

  He is, in truth, a most unusual man. I originally felt that he was a bigot; I was wrong. It would be fairer to say that he dislikes all races equally, including Man. And yet I am no longer uncomfortable in his company, possibly because he treats me with the same lack of cordiality that he treats everyone, even his own grand-daughter.

  And, as if in contradiction to my assessment, he is also capable of acts of the utmost generosity and loyalty, although he does not like to be thanked for them, and indeed is at his most surly on those occasions when I have tried.

  For example, I had to journey to Binder X on a mission for him. Only one passenger ship per week flies there from Far London, since it has little commerce with the Inner Frontier, and when I applied for passage, I was told that all the second-class seats had been taken and that aliens (which is Man's somewhat curious term for non-Men, since Man himself is an alien on more than a million worlds) were not permitted to purchase first-class compartments, even though I was demonstrably able to pay for one and more than half of them had not been sold. I reported my predicament to Mr. Abercrombie, who made a single call— and suddenly I was given not merely a compartment but a two-room suite! It was such an act of generosity that I could not bring myself to tell him that the moment the ship took off I immediately left my quarters and spent most of the journey in the second-class lounge, mingling with the other non-human passengers. If he cannot understand the concept of the House, how could I ever explain to him the warmth and security of the Herd?

  When I thanked him for sparing me this imagined humiliation, he replied that I was his employee, and that the insult was to him. It was not the treatment of aliens as inferiors that bothered him; in fact, it is a concept with which he is in wholehearted agreement. But the treatment of Malcolm Abercrombie's servants as inferiors is evidently not to be tolerated, even when that servant is myself.

  He is truly a man of contradictions. One of the wealthiest men on Far London, able to purchase anything that he desires, he nonetheless seems not to enjoy his money. His knowledge of art is, at best, limited, and yet he has spent a considerable portion of his fortune on it. Most Men refuse to use robotic or non-human assistants or employees, fearing the encroachment of the former and feeling contemptuous of the latter, but Mr. Abercrombie's house is run by three robots, and I am the only other sentient entity with access to the premises. He has made an enormous contribution to a local hospital in the name of one of his deceased sons, and yet he distrusts doctors so much that he suffers with a very painful tumor at the base of his spine rather than allow them to remove it. He refuses to speak about either of his dead sons, though I feel certain that he loved them; he speaks constantly of his daughter and his grandchild, both of whom— unbelievably— he loathes. He spends thousands of credits on his gardens, and never walks through them or even looks at them from his window. He speaks to me in the most insulting manner, and yet I believe he would never permit any other Man to do the same, at least while I am in his employ. He pays me barely enough for my own subsistence, and yet I know he has made generous arrangements with both the Claiborne Galleries and the House of Crsthionn. He has a huge stock of wine, whiskey, and other human stimulants, but I have never known him to partake of any of them, nor does he keep them for visitors, of which he has absolutely none.

  His library, both of books and tapes, is virtually nonexistent, nor has he an entertainment center in his house, and yet he rarely leaves, preferring to monitor his investments and issue his orders via his computer. He claims to have no interest in alien races, and yet whenever I mention the Bjornn, he always has questions about them. He is especially interested in the organization of the House, but seems totally incapable of understanding that it is the Pattern that determines the House rather than the reverse. And he is alternately mystified and outraged by the concept of blood mothers and Pattern Mothers, and although he disdains his own daughter's company, he cannot comprehend why I have no interest whatsoever in my blood mother. He is furious that his daughter married a man of whom he disapproved, which is perfectly understandable; while at the same time, he is mystified by the fact that I have no objection to the House having selected my Pattern Mate for me while I was still a child.

  Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this singularly fascinating man is his obsession with a woman wh
o may never have existed, and who, if indeed she did exist, has been dead for at least seven millennia.

  In fact, it is this obsession that led to my current employment, for in his quest for artwork featuring this woman, Mr. Abercrombie has retained me in the dual capacities of purchasing agent and researcher.

  My first assignment was to fly to Binder X to obtain a hologram featuring this particular woman. The voyage took five uneventful days, during which time I made the acquaintance of a number of Declanites and Darbeenans, who were making connections at Binder to their own distant planets.

  Once on Binder X it took me two days to trace the hologram, and finally I presented myself to its owner, a woman named Hannah Comstock. She was not the person who had purchased it when I attended the auction at which it had been sold a few years ago, but had evidently bought it privately in the intervening years.

  The attitude toward non-humans is considerably more liberal on the worlds of the Inner Frontier, and I had no difficulty securing an invitation to visit her at her home, which was about five miles from the center of Fort Rodriguez, the smallest of Binder X's five cities.

  Upon arriving, I explained the purpose of my mission— that I had been authorized to purchase the hologram for Malcolm Abercrombie— and after her initial protestations that she admired it too much to ever part with it, she named a price that I considered to be at least half again what it was worth. I relayed this information to Mr. Abercrombie, who contacted her himself and concluded the purchase while I was sleeping at my hotel.

  When I arrived at Mrs. Comstock's house the next morning to take possession of the hologram, I asked her if she knew anything about its history. She did not, but had purchased it because of the artist, a man named Peter Klipstein. His name was unfamiliar to me, and she explained that he was the man who had opened up the Corvus system to human colonization, and that they regard him as a great hero. She had therefore concluded that Klipstein's name probably made the hologram quite valuable, at least to the Corvus colonists, and had purchased it primarily as an investment.

  I inquired if she knew of any other Klipstein holograms, and she replied that she was unaware of the existence of any, and had indeed been surprised to find that he had created this one, although she had the signature authenticated before purchasing it.

  Since my ship did not leave for New Rhodesia, my next port of call, for another day, I stopped by a local library and had the main computer bring up Peter Klipstein's biographical data for me. This was a mistake, since he has been the subject of no less than twenty-seven full-length biographies. Finally I had the computer sift through the biographies and supply me with a ten-thousand-word history of the man, which I shall now condense even further for you.

  Peter Klipstein was a member of the Pioneer Corps, that branch of the government charged with charting and exploring new worlds for human colonization in the early days of the Republic, some twenty-five centuries ago. (Evidently the Pioneer Corps had been created at the onset of the Galactic Era, survived through both the Republic and the Democracy, and was disbanded only after the advent of the Oligarchy some four hundred years ago.)

  After charting some six other systems, Klipstein came to the Corvus system, where he found one habitable world, Corvus II, and supervised the terraforming of another, Corvus III.

  When he retired from the Pioneer Corps at age forty-seven, he settled on Corvus III, purchasing a huge estate that was unsuitable for farming, and lived in unthinkable isolation, far from family and friends. The Democracy was unable to closely monitor all the Frontier worlds it had accumulated, and when Corvus III was invaded by the Klokanni, their Navy was in no position to come to the aid of the embattled colonists. The planet was conquered in less than three days, and it was then that Klipstein began a one-man campaign of sabotage and terrorism that resulted in the abandonment of Corvus III by the Klokanni. When it was over, he was offered the governorship of Corvus III, which was now renamed Klipstein. He refused, and returned to live out his remaining years alone on his estate. There was no data in any of the biographies about his work as an artist, and I suspect that his output was minimal, for although it is obviously computer-enhanced, it is nonetheless a striking piece, and had he guided his computer in producing many more such works he would surely have received some measure of recognition within the field.

  My other duty, in addition to purchasing renderings of the woman with whom Mr. Abercrombie has become so fascinated, is to try to find other works of art in which she is featured. Since her appearance in paintings created thousands of years and trillions of miles apart remains a mystery, I hoped I might clarify it by finding out what, if anything, the various artists had in common. To that end, I instructed the library's master computer to attempt to determine what background or experiences Klipstein might have shared with Christopher Kilcullen, an artist whose painting of the woman had recently been auctioned on Far London.

  The answer was discouraging. Klipstein died almost two millennia before Kilcullen was born. They lived fifty-five thousand light-years apart. Klipstein was an explorer and mapmaker; Kilcullen, a career officer in the Navy. Neither had ever studied art, and while it seemed apparent that the hologram was Klipstein's only serious venture into the field, Kilcullen was well on his way to establishing a reputation at the time of his death. Klipstein was an atheist; Kilcullen, a devout member of a minor Christian cult. Klipstein had never married, and the biographies imply that he may have lived a totally celibate life; Kilcullen was married four times, divorcing his first wife and outliving his next three. Indeed, so diverse were their lives that the only thing I could find in common is that each, at one point, fought against overwhelming enemy strength with commendable courage, even heroism.

  This led me to believe that the subject may not have been a real woman, but rather the representation of some ancient war goddess. The computer, however, was able to find no dark-haired goddess of war in human mythology. I then had it determine whether any dark-haired woman existed as a founding member or even a patron saint of the Navy, and was given a negative response, not very surprising considering that Klipstein's battle hardly qualified as an official action of the Navy.

  I spent my final hours on Binder X in the library, trying to find some link between their lives other than the military, while the computer continued to insist that none existed.

  Finally I had to leave for New Rhodesia, and I boarded a small passenger ship, my questions still unanswered. Fortunately this ship, too, had a complement of non-human passengers, and I was able to spend most of the voyage in their midst. I had to transfer ships at the little colony world of Morioth II. The remainder of my journey was almost unbearable, as there were only six other passengers, five Men and a Canphorite, and they kept entirely to their compartments. By the time we landed I had concluded that Klipstein was totally mad, for no sane being would willingly shut himself off from the warmth and safety of other members of his own species.

  (In fact, my revered Pattern Mother, the thought has occurred to me that the galaxy is dominated by a completely insane race, for who but Man so cherishes the frightening concept of privacy? Certainly a case can be made for it.)

  New Rhodesia is a lovely green and blue world. Its northern continent is composed almost entirely of heavily forested mountains, but its two southern continents, flat and crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, are ideal for farming. It has a unique trade arrangement with its sister world, New Zimbabwe, which is some seven light-years distant, and supplies it with all of its metals and fissionable materials in exchange for grains and meats. Furthermore, the two worlds have pooled their resources to form an economic cooperative when trading with all other worlds of the Oligarchy.

  The Lodinite ambassador met me at the spaceport (only Lodin XI, Canphor VI and VII, and Galaheen IX, of all the non-human worlds, have embassies on New Rhodesia). With his help it took less than an hour to locate the owner of the painting I sought, as New Rhodesia, being primarily an agricultural world, is far
less populated than New Zimbabwe, where almost eighty percent of the people from this unique economic cooperative reside. The ambassador warned me that the New Rhodesians were more xenophobic than was common for a Frontier world, and even with his intervention on my behalf, I spent a full day working my way through an inordinate number of restrictions and petty statutes before I was allowed to leave the spaceport and proceed to my destination.

  The man I sought was Orestes Minneola, a retired dietary chemist who lived in a luxurious apartment in Salisbury, a bustling city about two hundred miles west of the spaceport. He invited me into his main room and treated me with civility, but I could tell that my presence made him uncomfortable. When he learned the purpose of my visit, he allowed me to examine the painting, which he had hanging in another room, but he stated that it was not for sale as it possessed a certain sentimental value to him. I explained that Mr. Abercrombie would pay him considerably more than he himself had paid for it, but he remained adamant.

  Finally, when he had convinced me that he was not merely assuming an aggressive bargaining position but indeed had no intention of parting with the painting, I asked him what particular attachment he had to the painting. He replied that Rafael Jamal, the artist, was one of his heroes, and had supposedly spent the last few years of his life working on the painting.