The Devil's Eye

FIVE

I didn't usually look forward to getting back on board the Belle-Marie . Maybe I was getting old. But it's a bit confining, physically and otherwise. I'd become a city-lights type, I guess. I liked parties and guys. I liked the social side of my job, which kept me running around with Alex, playing Rainbow's public relations maven. I got to meet a lot of interesting people, interesting in that so many of them had serious accomplishments on the record. And also that many of them were passionate about the bits and pieces of our past that had survived, sometimes across thousands of years. Watching them walk through our traveling exhibit, pressing their fingers against a display case, holding the captain's insignia from a vessel that left Earth in the first years of the interstellar age, staring at the laser rifle that misfired while Michael Ungueth was trying to hold back the giant lizard during the evacuation of Maryblinque, listening to their voices drop to a whisper-What other line of work could have matched any of that? Maybe too much had changed. Alex had become driven, and I knew there'd be no peace until he figured out what kind of message Vicki Greene had been trying to send. Nonetheless, this time, I was glad to see the ship again. He was back in the passenger cabin, still making calls to clients while I got ready for departure. When he finally signed off, he buzzed my line, thanked me again, admitted we were probably on a wild-goose chase, but pointed out we were being paid very well. Twenty minutes later, we were on our way.

When the quantum drive first appeared on the scene four years earlier, replacing the old Armstrong, it had seemed like near-instantaneous transportation. It could cover five light-years in a few minutes. But it was less accurate than the older system, so there was inevitably a long glide time, often a few days, into the target area. This was true regardless of the range of the hyperspace transition. If you arrived, say, twenty-five million klicks out from the space station and tried to jump closer, you might find yourself twice as far away on the other side. It was, at best, an erratic system. I'd always thought of Rimway as being on the edge of the galaxy. But Salud Afar was thirty-one thousand light-years farther out, pretty much in intergalactic space. As we pulled away from Skydeck and began accelerating, I tried to picture going all the way out there on Armstrongs. "I just can't imagine how they did it," I told Alex. "Actually," he said, "they didn't have the Armstrong when people first went to Salud Afar." "What did they have?" "We're talking four thousand years ago, Chase. I'm not sure anybody knows what they had, or how long the flight took. But the Armstrong had only been around a few centuries." We talked about it in the past tense because it was now in the process of being supplanted by the technology the Dellacondans had developed during their war with the Mutes. The quantum drive, which got you around a lot faster.

Traveling all the way to Salud Afar with a primitive system made no sense to me. "I can understand that explorers might have found the place, but the flight must have taken years. Why would anybody settle out there?" Alex grinned. "Some people like solitude," he said. "Back to Eden." "Something like that. It's apparently a nice place. Oxygen content perfect. It has broad oceans, beautiful views. Gravity's light, a little more than eight-tenths of a gee. So you don't weigh so much. The only thing the place lacked was stars." "So what's the plan when we get there?" "Find out where Vicki Greene went and track her. It shouldn't be hard to pick up her trail." "Alex, she was one person on a world of, what, about two billion?" "But she's well-known. There'll be media stories. Some people will have met her. It should be easy."

Alex had been collecting the names of Salud Afar's reviewers, book dealers, other horror writers, the president of the Last Gasp Society, anybody who would have had an interest in talking to Vicki. We sent off about a hundred messages letting everybody know we were coming and inviting anyone who'd seen her or worked with her or knew about her to get back to us. When that was done, we made our jump into hyperspace and settled in for a long ride. Alex had always been an easy guy on this kind of mission. There aren't too many people I want to be cooped up with for a month at a crack. But Alex was okay. He could talk about almost anything, he could listen, he had an open mind, he let me pick the entertainment, and he was always good for a laugh. Once under way, he put the Vicki Greene puzzle aside. There was, he said, no point dwelling on it until we got more information.

He took to reading her novels. I tried one of them, Etude in Black , in which a full-throated singer could, when aroused, literally bring down the house. And I know how that sounds, but if you've ever read Vicki Greene, you know she can get away with the most outrageous stuff. She made it believable, and I sat there for most of it with my hair standing straight up. The guy didn't want to do any damage, but his voice was so magnificent he simply couldn't resist occasionally taking things to the wall. After that, I'd had enough. But I read The Moron's Guide to Vicki Greene . It maintained she liked abandoned buildings, particularly crumbling churches, which inevitably produced terrible surprises for her characters, who, usually, were there because they'd been stranded in some way, a flyer had gone down, or a boat blown off course. The danger comes, not from a manic supernatural creature, as is usually the case in modern horror novels, but from a supernatural source accidentally provoked. One of the summaries argued that Greene's primary strength, the characteristic that makes her so popular, was her ability to create a sense of empathy with the person wielding the force that is scaring the wits out of everyone else. She wrote about people "getting lost in the cosmic maelstrom." I'm quoting here, and, yes, I don't know what that means any more than you do. But it gets its punch from a demonic possession, or a ghostly presence from another time, or a spirit bound to the mortal world because it can't get rid of some aspect of its physical existence. Or it's a lover who simply can't let go, or, as in Love You to Death , a man whose passions cause their objects to overheat. Literally. Well, okay. Not my kind of leisure reading. I scare too easily. But I could see that for some people, that sort of thing could become addictive. In the meantime, Alex read each of the novels and expressed his admiration for Vicki's writing ability. "I know the academic world doesn't take her very seriously," he said, "but her name is going to survive." I began devoting my attention to working on the Rainbow catalog, which had to be updated on a regular basis. I would have liked to include the Atlantean brick, which would have been a star attraction. It was a bit late for that, though. Most of the items, almost all of them, did not belong to us. Rainbow usually acted simply as a trading partner, putting buyers and sellers together. But that wasn't enough to occupy me for more than a couple of days. So we took to attending virtual

concerts and watching musicals and doing whatever we could to help time pass. Alex had a passion for ancient American music, and we spent one particularly riveting evening listening to the Bronx Strings perform a medley of tunes from that distant era, including two of the earliest pieces of music known: "All That Jazz" and "That Old Man River." It was the first time I'd heard either, and they were the high point of the flight.

A month after departure, we emerged from hyperspace. Usually, you make your jump out into normal space and the sky lights up. You get the local sun-assuming you've jumped into a planetary system, which is almost inevitably the case-and a sky full of stars. And maybe some planets and moons. Near Salud Afar, you get the sun and not much else. In our rear, a gauzy arc marked the rim of the Milky Way. Salud Afar was a small bright globe, dead ahead. Otherwise, the sky was utterly dark, save for two stars, one bright and one dim. "It's unique among worlds with large land animals," said Belle. "It's the only such world known that has no moon. It's believed to have had one originally, but it was probably lost during the Transit." The Transit referred to the passage of an object, probably a black hole or a dwarf star, that had scrambled the system. "Theory has always held that a large moon is necessary to prevent a terrestrial-sized world from developing a distinct wobble. Which would, of course, play havoc with climatic conditions."

"Of course," I said.

"Here, for whatever reason, the wobble has not happened."

"How far are we?" I asked.

"Three days out."

One of the two stars, the dim one, was actually the planet Sophora. The other, a dazzling sapphire in the sky, was Callistra, twelve hundred light-years away. "It's a supergiant," said Belle. And that was it. Otherwise, the sky was jet-black. "Okay. Belle, let's open a channel to their operations center." She complied. "Samuels Ops," I said, "this is the Belle-Marie . Approaching from Rimway. Range 4.1 million klicks. Request log-in and instructions." A female voice replied: "Instructions are being forwarded to your AI in separate package, Belle-Marie. Welcome to Salud Afar." "Thank you, Ops. Estimate arrival three standard days." "You are clear. Continue on course. By the way, Belle-Marie , we have some mail for you." "Would you forward it, please?"

"Doing it now."

They were responses to our inquiries about Vicki. Most were negative. Didn't know her. Knew she was here but didn't get a chance to meet her. Got her to sign a crystal but they were moving us right along. Johansen, the guy who'd enjoyed several cups of imkah with Vicki, told us he hadn't actually been with her. "She was at her hotel during the interview. I never left the studio. Didn't actually see her in person."

Of the rest, five claimed to have spent time with her. Among them was Austin Gollancz, who represented the local firm that published her on Salud Afar. "I hope," he added, "she's okay." He lived in Marinopolis. It was the original name, now restored, for the capital of Komalia, which was the principal state on the world. During the height of the Directorate, it had been Cleev City , named for the family that had for so long held global sway. We set up a conference with Gollancz. There was a time delay, but it wasn't a problem. "She came here the day after she arrived," he said. He was a small, round, prosperous-looking guy. It was obvious he'd liked Vicki. "We talked business." "Anything else?" Alex asked.

"Well, she was excited to be here. Talked about visiting some of our spookier places. She expected to have a great time."

"Did she have an itinerary of any kind, Austin?"

"Not that I know of."

"Anybody she planned to travel with?"

"If so, she didn't mention it to me. And look, Alex, I know I'm not being much help. But this is such a shock. I want you to know if I can do anything, anything at all, just ask. Okay?"

"Sure."

"Thanks, Alex."