Forbidden Planets (2 page)
Imbry turned from the thing and found that it took an increased effort to do so. He took up the dark cloth in which Ganche had brought the object and covered its brightness. He kept seeing a ghost of its outline imprinted on the walls, as if it were the negative image of a bright light.
“I’ve found it best not to stare at it too long,” said the big man. “But what on Old Earth is it?”
“Certainly not
of
Old Earth,” Imbry said. “It’s of ultraterrene origin. I’d lay a hept to a bent grimlet on that.”
of
Old Earth,” Imbry said. “It’s of ultraterrene origin. I’d lay a hept to a bent grimlet on that.”
“Ramoulian often haunts the spaceport,” Ganche said, “in hopes of coming across baggage that is indifferently attended. He has been known to wear a cleaner’s uniform. Or he inserts himself into a stream of disembarking passengers, playing the affable traveler. He strikes up a conversation with some offworlder and offers guidance. Then he leads the mark into a dark and out-of-the-way corner and relieves him of his burdens. Perhaps this was in someone’s valise.”
“Possibly,” said Imbry. “But why was Ramoulian languishing with his prize in an alley when the scroots were on the prowl?”
“Again, Red Abandon?”
“It has an unmistakable odor,” Imbry said. “Did he smell of it?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Then I lean toward the notion that this object caused the distraction.”
Ganche lifted up a corner of the covering cloth. “It does not affect me that strongly.”
“Nor I,” said Imbry. “Perhaps Ramoulian was peculiarly susceptible. But the main question is: What is it?”
“No,” said the other man, “the main question is: What is it worth? You are more knowledgeable than I in the buying and selling of art.”
Imbry stroked his plump earlobe with a meditative finger. “I have no idea,” he said. “We will find out by offering it in auction to a carefully chosen group of buyers. My commission will be forty percent.”
“Fifteen,” said Ganche with a speed that was reflexive. They haggled a few more moments and settled on thirty percent, which had been Imbry’s intent.
When they had executed the mutual motions of hand and arm by which such bargains were sealed, Imbry said, “I may consult an expert in extraterrene artifacts.”
“Discreetly,” Ganche said.
“Of course.” There was another brief haggle and a flurry of gestures that decided how the expert’s fee would be paid.
“So you think it is, in fact, a manufactured item?” Ganche said. “I thought it might be of natural origin.”
Imbry moved his large, round head in a gesture of indecision. He tucked the square of black cloth about the object, then lifted it gently and deposited it in the large satchel he had brought with him. The thing was surprisingly heavy—densely packed, he thought. He closed up the bag and activated the fastenings. The room seemed emptier now that the object was out of sight.
Imbry repaired to his operations center, a room in a nondescript house on a quiet street in a modest neighborhood. He traveled carefully, taking detours and laying false trails by entering public buildings that were busy with people, going in by the main doors then immediately departing by rear exits.
Partly, this was habitual caution; a practitioner of Imbry’s profession never knew when the scroots might have singled him out for preemptive surveillance. Lately, though, he had found himself caught up in a worrisome dispute with Alwinder Mudgeram, a man of blunt opinions and brutal instincts who was convinced that Luff Imbry owed him a substantial sum. The funds had been advanced toward a project that had not come to fruition. Unforeseen disappointments could blight any line of endeavor, Imbry had counseled Mudgeram, advising him to consider his lost capital a failed investment. But the investor preferred to see it as a debt to be repaid, and Mudgeram was renowned for collecting every groat due him.
Secure in his operations center, Imbry had his integrator deploy a research and communications matrix that spent most of its time disguised as a piece of battered furniture. He removed the mysterious object from the satchel and unwrapped it, taking care to keep his eyes averted, and let the matrix’s percepts scan it. Its effects upon him he found annoying, as if it were a spoiled child who kept tugging at his garment, insistently importuning him with, “Look at me! Look at me!”
As soon as it was scanned, he rewrapped and resatcheled the object, then placed it in a concealed locker beneath the floor of a closet that appeared to be stuffed with the kind of items one acquired at jumble sales. Some of the bric-a-brac had artfully concealed functions that would have drawn sharp attention from agents of the Archonate Bureau of Scrutiny.
“Integrator,” he said. “Conduct a class-two inquiry as to nature and origins.” Imbry had designed his integrator, as he had designed the closet’s false kitsch, to answer the special circumstances that often arose in the conduct of his business. What he called a class-two inquiry, for example, was not unlike an information search along Old Earth’s connectivity grid that any citizen might undertake, except that Imbry’s integrator could ease in and out of public data stores without being noticed. That was important when the whereabouts of an item being researched and valued was of interest to the scroots.
The integrator hummed and fussed for several seconds. As he waited, Imbry was vexed to discover in himself a surprising urge to go to the closet and view the object. He got up and paced until his integrator reported that it had found no matches in publicly accessible records.
“We will try private sources,” Imbry said. “Catalogs from dealers in ultraterrene artworks, both here and . . .” He thought for a moment, then named the four planets along The Spray that were major nexi for trade in nonhuman artifacts and had offices on Old Earth where such catalogs would be found. “Plus any places where curios are discussed.”
It took a little longer for his matrix to locate and insert itself unnoticeably into the private data stores, but again it came back with no solid results. “Nothing from the dealers. I have a partial match, though the correspondence is less than ten percent,” his integrator said.
“Show me.”
The displayed image appeared in the air before him. It was a curved fragment, dark and stained, of something that had been broken. It superficially resembled the exterior of the object beneath the closet floor, except that its surface was not bright and glittering with points of diamond-hard light, nor did it shimmer with unnameable colors that ravished the eye.
“What is it?” Imbry said.
“It is tentatively identified as a fragment of the husk of a seedpod from an uncataloged world in the Back of Beyond,” the integrator said. “It may or may not have been part of some native artwork. It was recovered from a ship hired by an artifact hunter from Popsy.”
“What is Popsy?”
“An odd little world far down The Spray. The hunter’s name was Fallo Wickiram. He hired the ship on Bluepoint and was last seen heading toward the gas cloud called the Lesser Dark. He apparently landed on a number of uncouth worlds, gathering such curiosities as appealed to his taste. At some point, the period of the ship’s hire was up, and, as programmed, it returned to Bluepoint on its own. Wickiram was not aboard, and there was no indication as to what had become of him.”
“What was the last world he visited?” Imbry said.
“It has no name and apparently no attractions, since the records show that almost no one ever goes there. Here are its coordinates.” The integrator produced a string of numbers and vectors. They meant nothing to Imbry.
“How long ago did this occur?” he asked and learned that Wickiram had met his unknown fate several thousand years ago. Imbry thought about it for some moments, then said, “The information is of doubtful utility. Record it anyway, then let us press on.”
The mention of a seedpod triggered a new line of inquiry. The integrator reviewed records of artworks and more commonplace items made from such materials up and down The Spray. Several more leads appeared but, upon investigation, led nowhere. Imbry poked about in other avenues that suggested themselves, including the itineraries of any ships that had recently put down at the Olkney spaceport. But any spaceship, whether liner, freighter, or private yacht, stopped at so many worlds where they might connect to other worlds that the object’s possible routes to Old Earth were effectively infinite.
Finally, he checked for reports of robbery or fraud concerning recent arrivals to Olkney but found none in the public media nor in the elements of the Bureau of Scrutiny’s systems that he was able to access without detection. He concluded that if Chiz Ramoulian had acquired the object illicitly, the crime had gone either unreported or undiscovered.
Imbry steepled his fingers and touched them to his uppermost chin and stood in thought for a long moment. Then he said, “Connect me to The Honorable Ilarios Warrigrove.”
A few seconds passed while Imbry’s integrator contacted its equivalent at the Warrigrove manse and protocols were exchanged. Then an aquiline face marked by lines of care appeared in the air before Imbry. “You have something?” he said, his languid voice unable completely to disguise a note of sharp interest.
“Something I wish to have valued,” said Imbry.
“And will it be available for private purchase?”
“My plans have not yet assumed their final shape. At the moment, I’m considering an auction,” said Imbry, “but to a limited and discreet set of purchasers.”
“What do you have?”
“I will have to show it to you.”
“Intriguing.” Warrigrove’s expression showed an indolent mood, but Imbry’s finely tuned eye detected a concealed underwash of excitement. “I am free for an hour.”
“I’ll be there shortly.”
Imbry returned the room to its seeming unremarkableness and retrieved the object. Again he was irritated to experience an urge to take it from the satchel and gaze at its sparkles and flashes. He left the house and walked for several minutes, turning corners randomly, then hailed an aircar and had it take him to a specific corner on the other side of the city. Alighting there, he walked some more, then took another aircar to within several streets of Warrigrove’s manse and again took a circuitous route to the house’s rear gate. The who’s-there recognized him and admitted him to a walled and overgrown garden.
On the far side of the untended greenery was a tumbledown antique gazebo, swarmed by thick growing vines that also concealed systems that ensured that any sight or sound encountered within its leafy confines would not carry beyond them. Imbry followed a flagstoned path to the structure, slipped within, and found Ilarios Warrigrove seated on a chair of black iron behind a table of the same material, sipping from a tall thin glass filled with a pale yellow liquid. A carafe of the stuff and another glass stood on a tray before him. “Would you care to?” he asked with a gesture that Imbry’s eye noted was calculatedly relaxed.
“Why not?” the fat man said. He raised the glass, paused but a moment to inhale its delicate bouquet, then drained half of it at a gulp. “Excellent.”
They exchanged the gestures and pleasantries suitable to a casual encounter and the time of day, but Imbry saw how Warrigrove’s eyes kept flickering sideways to the satchel that hung from his unoccupied hand. The formalities accomplished, he placed the container on the table and withdrew its cloth-wrapped contents.
“Someone has asked me to sell this,” he said and whisked away the covering.
Warrigrove could not restrain an intake of breath.
“You know what it is,” Imbry said. He was adept at reading microexpressions and now saw Warrigrove consider, then reject, denial but opt for less than full disclosure, all in the time a tranquil man takes to blink.
“I know what it might be,” he said. “I had heard—only a rumor—that such a thing might be on its way to Old Earth.”
The aficionado spoke without taking his eyes from the scintillation. Imbry sensed that the man was unable to resist the attraction. For himself, he found that his annoyance at the thing’s importuning made it easier to look away. “What is it?” he asked.
Imbry watched the patrician face closely while Warrigrove framed his answer, and was fairly sure that he was about to hear the truth.
“A myth,” the man said, “or a chimera. An object of desire, longed for and sought after, though it may not truly exist.”
The fat man made a gesture that expressed cynicism. “That sounds like precisely the kind of thing that a cunning forger would contrive to dangle before the avid appetite.”
Warrigrove’s eyes did not leave the object. “Well, you would know,” he said.
Imbry acknowledged the truth of the observation. More than a few alleged masterworks that hung or stood or scampered in the palaces of wealthy collectors had come from his own hand, though they bore the signatures and sigils of bygone geniuses.
“Indeed,” Warrigrove continued, “if it is a fraud, you are precisely the kind of person one might expect to arrive asking, eyes wide with innocence, just what it might be.”
“Let us assume, for the moment,” Imbry said, “that my innocence is genuine and that the item is what it is supposed to be—then what is it?”
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