The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (45 page)

A shadow of frost crossed his face. But it passed quickly, and his voice was low and even when he said, “Yes.”

“It was looted,” Thorn said. “Everyone thought it was lost.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

Accusatory thoughts were bombarding her. He must have seen them, for he said calmly, “I collect art from the Holocide.”

“That’s macabre,” she said.

“A great deal of significant art was looted in the Holocide. In the years after, it was scattered, and entered the black markets of a dozen planets. Much of it was lost. I am reassembling a small portion of it, whatever I can rescue. It is very slow work.”

This explanation altered the picture Thorn had been creating in her head. Before, she had seen him as a scavenger feeding on the remains of a tragedy. Now he seemed more like a memorialist acting in tribute to the dead. Regretting what she had been thinking, she said, “Where do you find it?”

“In curio shops, import stores, estate sales. Most people don’t recognize it. There are dealers who specialize in it, but I don’t talk to them.”

“Don’t you think it should go back to the families that owned it?”

He hesitated a fraction of a second, then said, “Yes, I do.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jemma’s portrait. “If one of them existed, I would give it back.”

“You mean they’re
all
dead? Every one of them?”

“So far as I can find out.”

That gave the artwork a new quality. To its delicacy, its frozen-flower beauty, was added an iron frame of absolute mortality. An entire family, vanished. Thorn got up to go look at it, unable to stay away.

“The butterflies are all gone, too,” she said.

Magister Pregaldin came up behind her, looking at the painting as well. “Yes,” he said. “The butterflies, the girl, the family, the world, all gone. It can never be replicated.”

There was something exquisitely poignant about the painting now. The only surviving thing to prove that they had all existed. She looked up at Magister Pregaldin. “Were you there?”

He shook his head slowly. “No. It was before my time. I have always been interested in it, that’s all.”

“Her name was Jemma,” Thorn said. “Jemma Diwali.”

“How did you find that out?” he asked.

“It was in a book. A stupid book. It was all about abstractionist counter-layers and things. Nothing that really explained the painting.”

“I’ll show you what it was talking about,” the magister said. “Stand right there.” He positioned her about four feet from the painting, then took the lamp and moved it to one side. As the light moved, the image of Jemma Diwali disappeared, and in its place was an abstract design of interlocking spirals, spinning pinwheels of purple and blue.

Thorn gave an exclamation of astonishment. “How did that happen?”

“It is in the microscopic structure of the butterfly wings,” Magister Pregaldin explained. “Later, I will show you one under magnification. From most angles they reflect certain wavelengths of light, but from this one, they reflect another. The skill in the painting was assembling them so they would show both images. Most people think it was just a feat of technical virtuosity, without any meaning.”

She looked at him. “But that’s not what you think.”

“No,” he said. “You have to understand, Vind art is all about hidden messages, layers of meaning, riddles to be solved. Since I have had the painting here, I have been studying it, and I have identified this pattern. It was not chosen randomly.” He went to his terminal and called up a file. A simple algebraic equation flashed onto the screen. “You solve this equation using any random number for X, then take the solution and use it as X to solve the equation again, then take
that
number and use it to solve the equation again, and so forth. Then you graph all the solutions on an X and Y axis, and this is what you get.” He hit a key and an empty graph appeared on the screen. As the machine started to solve the equation, little dots of blue began appearing in random locations on the screen. There appeared to be no pattern at all, and Thorn frowned in perplexity.

“I’ll speed it up now,” Magister Pregaldin said. The dots started appearing rapidly, like sleet against a window or sand scattered on the floor. “It is like graphing the result of a thousand dice throws, sometimes lucky, sometimes outside the limits of reality, just like the choices of a life. You spend the first years buffeted by randomness, pulled this way by parents, that way by friends, all the variables squabbling and nudging, quarreling till you can’t hear your own mind. And then, patterns start to appear.”

On the screen, the dots had started to show a tendency to cluster. Thorn could see the hazy outlines of spiral swirls. As more and more dots appeared in seemingly random locations, the pattern became clearer and clearer.

Magister Pregaldin said, “As the pattern fills in, you begin to see that the individual dots were actually the pointillist elements of something beautiful: a snowflake, or a spiral, or concentric ripples. There is a pattern to our lives; we just experience it out of order, and don’t have enough data at first to see the design. Our path forward is determined by this invisible artwork, the creation of a lifetime of events.”

“You mean, like fate?” Thorn said.

“That is the question.” Her tutor nodded gravely, staring at the screen. The light made his face look planar and secretive. “Does the pattern exist before us? Is our underlying equation predetermined, or is it generated by the results of our first random choice for the value of X? I can’t answer that.”

The pattern on the screen was clear now; it was the same one hidden under the portrait. Thorn glanced from one to the other. “What does this have to do with Jemma?”

“Another good question,” Magister Pregaldin said thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Perhaps it was a message to her from the artist, or a prediction – one that never had a chance to come true, because she died before she could find her pattern.”

Thorn was silent a moment, thinking of that other girl. “Did she die in the Holocide?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know her?”

“I told you, I wasn’t there.”

She didn’t believe him for a second. He
had
been there, she was sure of it now. Not only had he been there, he was still there, and would always be there.

*     *     *

Several days later Thorn stepped out of the front door on her way to classes, and instantly sensed something wrong. There was a hush; tension or expectation had stretched the air tight. Too few people were on the street, and they were casting glances up at the city. She looked up toward where the Corkscrew rose, a black sheet-iron spiral that looked poised to drill a hole through the sky. There was a low, rhythmic sound coming from around it.

“Bick!” she cried out when she saw the Waster heading home laden down with groceries, as if for a siege. “What’s going on?”

“You haven’t heard?” Bick said.

“No.”

In a low voice, Bick said, “The Protector was assassinated last note.”

“Oh. Is that good or bad?”

Bick shrugged. “It depends on who they blame.”

As Bick hurried on her way, Thorn stood, balanced between going home and going on to warn Magister Pregaldin. The sound from above grew more distinct, as of slow drumming. Deciding abruptly, Thorn dashed on.

The denizens of Weezer Alley had become accustomed to the sight of Thorn passing through to her lessons. Few of them were abroad this forenote, but she nearly collided with one coming out of the tobacco shop. It was a renegade priest from Glory to God who had adopted the Waster lifestyle as if it were his own. Everyone called him Father Sin.

“Ah, girl!” he exclaimed. “So eager for knowledge you knock down old men?”

“Father Sin, what’s that sound?” she asked.

“They are beating the doorways of their houses in grief,” he said. “It is tragic, what has happened.”

She dashed on. The sound had become a ringing by the time she reached Magister Pregaldin’s doorway, like an unnatural Note. She had to wait several seconds after knocking before the door opened.

“Ah, Thorn! I am glad you are here,” Magister Pregaldin said when he saw her. “I have something I need to . . .” He stopped, seeing her expression. “What is wrong?”

“Haven’t you heard the news, Magister?”

“What news?”

“The Protector is dead. Assassinated. That’s what the ringing is about.”

He listened as if noticing it for the first time, then quickly went to his terminal to look up the news. There was a stark announcement from the Protectorate, blaming “Enemies of God,” but of course no news. He shut it off and stood thinking. Then he seemed to come to a decision.

“This should not alter my plans,” he said. “In fact, it may help.” He turned to Thorn, calm and austere as usual. “I need to make a short journey. I will be away for two days, three at most. But if it takes me any longer, I will need you to check on my apartment, and make sure everything is in order. Will you do that?”

“Of course,” Thorn said. “Where are you going?”

“I’m taking the wayport to one of the other city-states.” He began then to show her two plants that would need watering, and a bucket under a leaky pipe that would need to be emptied. He paused at the entrance to his bedroom, then finally gestured her in. It was just as cluttered as the other rooms. He took a rug off a box, and she saw that it was actually a small refrigerator unit with a temperature gauge on the front showing that the interior was well below freezing.

“This needs to remain cold,” he said. “If the electricity should go out, it will be fine for up to three days. But if I am delayed getting back, and the inside temperature starts rising, you will need to go out and get some dry ice to cool it again. Here is the lock. Do you remember the recursive equation I showed you?”

“You mean Jemma’s equation?”

He hesitated in surprise, then said, “Yes. If you take 27 for the first value of X, then solve it five times, that will give you the combination. That should be child’s play for you.”

“What’s in it?” Thorn asked.

At first he seemed reluctant to answer, but then realized he had just given her the combination, so he knelt and pecked it out on the keypad. A light changed to green. He undid several latches and opened the top, then removed an ice pack and stood back for her to see. Thorn peered in and saw nested in ice a ball of white feathers.

“It’s a bird,” she said in puzzlement.

“You have seen birds, have you?”

“Yes. They don’t have them here. Why are you keeping a dead bird?”

“It’s not dead,” he said. “It’s sleeping. It is from a species they call ice owls, the only birds known to hibernate. They are native to a planet called Ping, where the winters last a century or more. The owls burrow into the ice to wait out the winter. Their bodies actually freeze solid. Then when spring comes, they revive and rise up to mate and produce the next generation.”

The temperature gauge had gone yellow, so he fitted the ice pack back in place and latched the top. The refrigerator hummed, restoring the chest to its previous temperature.

“There was a . . . I suppose you would call it a fad, once, for keeping ice owls. When another person came along with a suitable owl, the owners would allow them both to thaw so they could come back to life and mate. It was a long time ago, though. I don’t know whether there are still any freezer owls alive but this one.”

Another thing that might be the last of its kind. This apartment was full of reminders of extinction, as if Magister Pregaldin could not free his mind of the thought.

But this one struck Thorn differently, because the final tragedy had not taken place. There was still a hope of life. “I’ll keep it safe,” she promised gravely.

He smiled at her. It made him look strangely sad. “You are a little like an owl yourself,” he said kindly. “Older than the years you have lived.”

She thought, but did not say, that he was also like an owl – frozen for 141 years.

They left the apartment together, she heading for home and he with a backpack over his shoulder, bound for the waystation.

Thorn did not wait two days to revisit the apartment alone to do some true detective work.

It was the day of the Protector’s funeral, and Glory to God was holding its breath in pious suspension. All businesses were closed, even in the Waste, while the mourning rituals went on. Whatever repercussions would come from the assassination, they would not occur this day. Still, Thorn wore the veil when she went out, because it gave her a feeling of invisibility.

The magister’s apartment was very quiet and motionless when she let herself in. She checked on the plants and emptied the pail in order to give her presence the appearance of legitimacy. She then went into the magister’s bedroom, ostensibly to check the freezer, but really to look around, for she had only been in there the one time. She studied the art-encrusted walls, the shaving mirror supported by mythical beasts, the armoire full of clothes that had once been fine but now were shabby and outmoded. As she was about to leave she spotted a large box – a hexagonal column about three feet tall – on a table in a corner. It was clearly an offworld artifact because it was made of wood. Many sorts of wood, actually: the surface was an inlaid honeycomb design. But there were no drawers, no cabinets, no way inside at all. Thorn immediately realized that it must be a puzzle box – and she wanted to get inside.