A Talent for War (35 page)

The administrator's expression softened. "I see," he said. There was much about the man that was birdlike: his slightness; the quick, perfunctory moves; the sense that his attention flitted about the office, never resting more than a few seconds in one place.

"Unfortunately, my uncle neglected to identify the person who helped him, and I have no direct way of doing so. I need your help." I produced a photo. "This is my uncle."

The administrator squinted at it, and shook his head. "I don't know him."

"How many professionals do you have on your staff?"

"That depends on how you define the word."

"Define it any way you please. At least one of them will recognize the photo. Of course, I'd need to be sure I had the right person, so I'll expect him, or her, to be able to describe the project."

"Very well," he said, tossing the photo into a stack of paper. "I'll see what I can do."

"I couldn't ask for more." I lifted my left wrist ostentatiously, and spoke into the commlink.

"Jacob, we'll be making the transfer now." And to the administrator: "I'll need an account number."

He was only too happy to comply. I named the sum for Jacob, who acknowledged, and announced he was prepared to execute. About a week's pay for the administrator, I guessed. "It's yours. There's as much more if you find the person I'm looking for."

"Yes," he said, gaining interest. "I'm sure I can find him."

"By tonight."

He nodded. "Of course," he said. "Where can I reach you?"

Eric Hammersmith was sandy-haired, bearded, overweight, and he drank too much. I liked him immediately.

"I never really got to know your uncle," he said. We were in a pub downtown, huddled over a bottle of tomcat rum, and eying the gravity dancers while we talked. "He was kind of secretive.

He kept pretending the search he wanted me to do was part of a statistical study of some sort."

"Okay," I said.

"You'll forgive my saying so," he pinched my sleeve between thumb and forefinger. "But he was a lousy actor."

There was a loud dinner party in an adjoining room, and a fair amount of noise in the bar, so we had to lean close together to be heard.

Hammersmith was propped up on an elbow. He'd walked in sufficiently flushed that I suspected he'd done some early celebrating. "What," he asked, with an engaging smile, "was he up to?"

"He was trying to locate an archaeological site, Eric," I said. "It's a long story." And I hoped he wouldn't insist I tell it.

"With a constellation?" His eyebrows arched.

I drank my rum, and adapted an ignorant bystander attitude. "I guess it is strange. Fact is, I really didn't pay much attention to the details." The dancers were distracting him. "Anyway, he wanted to be sure you understood he was grateful for your help."

"I'm glad to hear it," he said. "It wasn't exactly by the book, you know."

"What wasn't?"

"What I'm trying to say is that I had to bend a few regulations. We're not supposed to use the equipment for private purposes."

"I understand." I repeated the process of setting up a transfer, this time for about six months'

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salary—as best I could guess.

"Thanks," said Hammersmith, his smile broadening. "Let me buy the next round."

I shrugged. "Okay."

He was waiting for me to transfer the money. When I didn't, he signaled the waiter, and we refilled our glasses. "I assume," he said, "you don't know any more than I do."

I was startled. Was I really that transparent? "You mean about the wheel?"

"Then you do know!"

Bingo. Results at last. "Of course." Somewhere in the Veiled Lady, there was a world in whose skies that circular constellation appeared. Nine on the rim, two at the hub. "By the way," I said, trying to sound nonchalant, "he used to talk about this quite a lot. Where is it, exactly, the world he was looking for?"

"Oh, yes." The dancers pursued each other erotically through a halo of soft blue light. "It took several weeks to find," he said, "because we're just not programmed to perform that kind of search. And the computers often weren't available. Actually," —he lowered his voice— "it's the first time I've taken a chance and broken the regulations. It's worth my job if anyone finds out."

Sure, I thought. That explains how the administrator was able to locate you so easily.

"It was a big job, Alex. There are 2.6 million stars in the Veiled Lady, and, without a very specific configuration, drawn by a computer, with precise angles between the stars, and exact magnitudes, he would be very likely to get a substantial number of possibilities. I mean, what's a wheel look like? Is it perfectly formed? If not, how much variance is there from the base line of arc? Are there really only nine stars? Or are there nine bright stars? We had to set some parameters, and the result was, to a large extent, guesswork."

"How many possibilities did you get?"

"Over two hundred. Or twelve thousand if you become a little liberal with the parameters." He watched me sympathetically, enjoying the frustration he imagined I was feeling. But I was thinking how Jacob and I had looked at the starship patterns weeks ago, and cut the search area down to ten thousand stars or so. Given those numbers, it should be easy to eliminate most of Hammersmith's targets. I was briefly tempted to buy a round for the house.

"Can you give me a printout?"

He reached into his jacket. "I brought it along in case you wanted proof." He delivered a broad grin.

"Thanks," I said. I completed the transfer, and got up. "You've been helpful, Eric."

We were both tossing cash onto the table. "Thank you," he said. "And Alex—?"

"Yes?"

"Gabe asked me not to say anything about this. To anyone. I wouldn't have, if he were still alive."

"I understand."

"I'd like a favor. If you ever find out what this is all about, would you come back and tell me what it is?"

Our eyes met. "If I can," I said, and walked out into a pleasant, late winter evening.

The primary target was located about thirteen hundred light years from Saraglia, in a region of the Veiled Lady that carried only coordinates and no name. "Two months, at least," Chase said.

"One way. It's a long way out."

XXI.

A starship is no place for a man in a hurry.

—Nolan Creel, The Arnheim Review, LXXIII, 31

WE RODE THE Grainger out to Saraglia. Grainger was the Capella's sister ship, and I
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thought a lot about Gabe while we drifted down the long gray tunnel.

The observation ports were, of course, shuttered. The view outside is a bit hard on the comfort level for most people; but there are a few places on the ship where a curious passenger who wants to see the nether world can indulge himself. One of them was a lounge called the Captain's Bar at the forward section of the topmost deck.

Chase and I retreated there after I recovered from the plunge into hyper. My reaction, by the way, seemed to be getting worse with each successive trip. And I sat there that first evening, refusing to say very much to anyone, morosely recalling my pledge to myself—it seemed a long time ago now—that I was returning to Rimway to travel no more.

We drank too much. Starship bars always do very well. And, with too much time to think, I got to wondering why the research team on the Tenandrome had agreed that they would say nothing of their find. And I worried about that.

I didn't eat well, and after a while even Chase seemed to grow moody. So we worried our way through the formless flux of a dimension whose existence, according to some, was purely mathematical in nature.

Eight days later, ship time, we made the jump back into linear. The passengers, as they recovered from the effects of the transit, crowded around the ship's viewports, which were now open, to gape at the spectacle of the Veiled Lady.

At this close range, it bore no resemblance to anything on a human scale. Even the nebular structure was no longer recognizable. Rather, we were staring at a vast congregation of individual stars, a blazing multitude of dazzling points of color spearing the soul, a river of light passing ultimately into infinity. How poor had Jacob's representation been in the study at home.

After a while, when I could stand it no more, I went into the bar. It was crowded.

The longest part of the flight now lay before us: the journey from the re-entry point to Saraglia itself, which, in the event, required two and a half weeks. I read a lot, and took to playing cards in the Captain's Lounge with a group of regulars. Chase frolicked in the gym and the pool with a young male whose name I've forgotten.

A pair of shuttles rendezvoused with us at the beginning of the third week. They carried passengers and cargo for the next phase of the Grainger's flight, and removed everyone bound for Saraglia. Chase said good-bye to her friend, and I was surprised to discover a sense of well-being at our departure.

Saraglia is a construct approximately the size of a small moon, orbiting the collapsed remnant of a supernova. Its mission was to serve as an observation station. But its proximity to the super dense star led to its development as a commercial center, specializing in a wide range of processing services for manufacturers whose products required the application of ultra-high pressures for extensive periods of time.

The station looks a trifle haphazard: the original structure was little more than a platform. But that's been long since encased within environmental pods, manufacturing shells, power extraction nets, loading and docking facilities and automated factories.

A substantial dust cloud—held in place by artificial gravity— orbits the complex, providing a shield against the harsh light of the Veiled Lady. Once inside the perimeter of the cloud, an observer is struck by the relatively soft illumination of the cylinder world, which spills out of a hundred thousand windows and ports and transparent panels and receiving bays. If Saraglia is on the edge of man's universe, it is also the warmest of his habitats.

We rode our shuttle into one of the bays, disembarked, and checked into a hotel. Chase immediately began preparations for the second phase of the journey.

I needed some recovery time though. So I went sightseeing among the forests and glades, and even spent a couple of afternoons enjoying one of its seacoast lodges.

Several days after our arrival, we were on our way again, in a leased Centaur. It wasn't as large as
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the vehicle that Gabe had authorized, and the accommodations were (as Chase pointed out with some asperity) rather Spartan for a long trip. But I hadn't got accustomed yet to controlling large amounts of money, and the price for the Centaur was sufficiently exorbitant.

As soon as the engines had built up a sufficient charge, we made the jump back into Armstrong.

"We'll make our re-entry in fifty-seven days," she said. "Shipboard days. Also, we have a decision to make."

"Go ahead."

"This is a long flight. Confederate regulations don't really apply out where we're going, but we're supposed to abide by them anyhow. If we follow the guidelines, we will allow three hundred A.U.s for reinsertion back into linear. Factoring in our inability to be precise, we might find ourselves very easily five or six hundred A.U.s off the target. Now, a Centaur's a lot slower in conventional space than a big commercial liner. If we aren't lucky, we could find ourselves with a long trip to get where we're going. Best bet would be to just go ahead and jump back in as close to the target as we can."

"Hell, no," I exploded. "We've waited all this time. I don't mind a little patience now."

"How about a lot of patience?"

"Oh," I said. "How much time are we talking?"

"Possibly the better part of a year."

"I don't think," I said, "you mentioned this before."

"I was making assumptions about how you'd want to handle it. Alex," she smiled and assumed her most soothing manner. "The chances of our actually materializing inside something are virtually nil. There's an enormous amount of empty space within the entry area we'd be using.

You'd be safer than flying a skimmer at home."

Her smile widened.

"That's not exactly reassuring," I said.

"Trust me," she beamed.

I've always been careful to ration my exposure to electronic fantasy. But that long ride out into the Veiled Lady provided the perfect excuse to dispense with old inhibitions. I retired to my cabin rather early in the voyage.

I traveled extensively through the ship's library, vacationing in a dozen different luxury spots.

Some of them actually existed, some did not, some never could. There was always at least one lovely woman on my arm. And their characters, of course, were amenable to my programming.

Chase knew. She stayed up front in the cockpit most of the time, reading and staring out into the gray tunnel which opened endlessly before us. She said little when I wandered up periodically to crash into a seat beside her. It was always mildly embarrassing, and I didn't know why. So I grew irritated with her.

Eventually I tired of the standard travelogues. I'd brought along some archaeological puzzle scenarios from Gabe's collection. These were elaborate adventures, set in mythical ruins against exotic locales: find and identify a curious artifact in a submerged temple peopled with grotesque, animated statuary; translate a set of three-dimensional symbols afloat within a cluster of translucent pyramids on a frozen tundra; piece together the meaning of an ancient sacrificial ritual which seems to hold the key to explaining how the original inhabitants produced, within a few generations, a savage race.

There was in all this a surprise.

When I got in trouble trying to get through a water-filled passageway in the temple, I was rescued and dragged into a stone basin by an exquisite, half-naked woman whom I remembered but was slow to pinpoint.

Ria.

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The woman in the photo in Gabe's bedroom.

She showed up again as a lovely savage in the ruined city, and among the pyramids as a magnificent wind-born creature with wings. Always she was there to rescue the adventurer and inform him he had lost the game; and on the one occasion that I got through to the end, she was waiting.