The Devil's Eye ab-4

by Jack McDevitt

  The following day we caught the shuttle from Drake City and rode it up to Galileo. We had a farewell dinner in a Chinese restaurant. It was an era of occasional armed confrontations between Ashiyyurean and Confederate warships. While we dipped into the chicken and spices, an HV began to run a report of a new incident. A Mute ship had gotten too close to a Confederate world, and a destroyer had fired on it. The Mutes were saying it was an accident. The ship had gotten off course. In any case, no casualties were being reported by either side. That got us increased attention from the other diners. Kassel ignored it. "Alex and Chase, you are welcome on Borkarat anytime. And we'd be happy to put you up at our place," he said. We told him we'd bring some brew with us. We were leaving, too, of course. Headed back to Rimway. We paid up, this one on Kassel, who insisted. When Kassel insisted, he tended to sound as if he meant it. We took a last look at Earth. We were on the nightside, over Europe and Africa. Lights everywhere, from Moscow to the Cape. Electrical storms glimmered in the Atlantic. Here was where it had started. The great diaspora.

  They were riding a diplomatic flight. We stayed with them until they boarded. They introduced us to a few of the other passengers, who were both Mute and human, and to the captain. Then it was time to go. We retreated back down the tube, they closed the hatches, and it was over. We made for the Belle-Marie , checked to make sure our luggage had arrived, and climbed on board. I went up onto the bridge, said hello to Belle, the AI, and began running my checkoff list. When I was satisfied everything was in order, I contacted the ops center and requested permission to depart. Minutes later we were on our way, gliding past the moon, adding velocity, and feeling pretty good. I could hear Alex talking in the cabin. Nothing unusual about that: He was having a conversation with Belle. We were looking at a four-hour flight, plus probably a day or two after we had made our transit out of hyperspace. It was a lot quicker than it would have been a few years back, when the Armstrong drive needed weeks to cover the same distance. I was making final heading adjustments before initiating our jump when I heard a third voice in the cabin. A woman's. Alex was checking his mail. I broke in. "Alex, prepare for jump." "Okay," he said. The last green light came on, indicating his harness was in place, and I eased us into hyperspace. Two minutes later he asked me to join him when I was free. I told Belle to take over, got out of my chair, and headed back. First thing I saw when I went into the common room was a female standing frozen, staring at Alex out of stricken eyes. It was a hologram, of course. She was young. Good-looking. Dark eyes and black hair cut short. She wore a white-and-gold blouse inscribed with the name HASSAN GOLDMAN above an arc of six stars. Something about her was familiar. "Who is she?"

  "Vicki Greene." "Vicki Greene? The Vicki Greene?" " The Vicki Greene." Vicki Greene, of course, was, and remains, an immensely popular novelist, a writer who specialized in horror and the supernatural. Voices in the night, demons in the basement: She'd made a substantial reputation by scaring the wits out of millions of readers across the Confederacy. "I wasn't aware you knew her." He lowered himself into his seat. "I don't." "Okay. Pity. So it's a business thing. She wants us to find something for her?" "Listen to this," he said. He directed Belle to run the transmission from the start. The image blinked off, blinked back on. Greene looked at Alex, then at me, did an appraisal, and turned back to the boss. "Mr. Benedict," she said, "I know this will strike you as odd, but I don't know who else can help me." She was having trouble controlling her voice. "Since you're not here, I'm asking your AI to forward this message. I'm in over my head, Mr. Benedict." She was staring at him. Her turn to be terrified. "God help me, they're all dead."

  Alex touched a control and froze her again. "That's it," he said. "That's it ?" "That is the sum of the transmission." "What's she talking about?" "I don't know. I've no idea." He took a deep breath. "I'm wondering if we're looking at a woman in the last stages of a breakdown." She had looked thoroughly spooked. "Maybe she's been writing too much horror," I said. "It's possible." "And you've never met her?" "No." " Who's all dead?" "Don't know." "Maybe a bunch of fictitious characters." I got coffee for both of us. "You might want to recommend she see somebody." "It's been in the folder for several days." "That's because we told Belle not to disturb us." He ran the artwork from her books. Etude in Black , which featured a young woman playing a stringed instrument in a spotlight while glowing eyes watched her from a dark curtain. Love You to Death , with a vulpine creature kneeling in sorrow at a grave site. Nightwalk , portraying a satanic figure in the clouds over a moonlit city. And three others with similar motifs: Wish You Were Here , Dying to Know You , and Midnight and Roses . "What do you think?" "Alex, she sounds like a lunatic." "She's in trouble, Chase." "You want my advice? Don't get involved."

  We couldn't send or receive a message while we were in hyperspace. We could have interrupted the jump, but there was really no point in that. So we waited until we arrived back at Rimway. Thirty seconds after we saw the stars again, he sat down and told Belle to record. "Ms. Greene," he said. "I just received your message." He stopped and looked in my direction. "Chase, how far out are we?" "About a day," I said. "Day and a half." He turned back to his message. "We've been away. I'll be in my office by the weekend. Meantime, if you want to talk to me, I'm within radio range now. Skydeck can put you through." He sat quietly for several moments, then told Belle to send it and looked up at me. "What's wrong, Chase?" "Nothing."

  "Come on. Talk to me." "I think you should be more careful about getting involved in other people's problems. You're an antiquities dealer, not a psychologist." "If she's in trouble, I wouldn't want to walk away from her." "If she's in trouble she can call the police."

  TWO

  We don't fear death because we lose tomorrow, but because we lose yesterday, with its sweet poignancy, its memories of growing children, of friends and lovers, of all that we have known. Nobody else has really been there in the way we have. And when the lights go out for us, for you or me, the lights go out in that world, too.

  - Wish You Were Here

  They're all dead.

  We cruised toward Rimway. With its big moon, it constituted a glittering double star in the sparse sky near the galactic rim. Vicki Greene didn't respond, didn't send a message, didn't say anything. The hours dragged on, and the double star grew into a pair of spheres. But Alex couldn't put it out of his mind. When we got closer, where the delay in signal exchange wouldn't be so great, he placed a call to her but was informed the code was inoperative. Temporarily out of service. Ordinarily he'd have dismissed the whole thing at that point as the work of a crank, but since it was Greene, he couldn't let go. Maybe it was that she was an icon, the biggest name in supernatural fiction. Not that he ever read any of it, but he liked meeting celebrities as much as the next guy. So, a day and a half after we'd tried to communicate with her, we docked at Skydeck and headed directly for Karl's Dellacondan Restaurant. It was traditionally our first stop after a flight. It doesn't matter how good the shipboard food is, and we get good stuff on board the Belle-Marie , it's always a pleasure to make for a real dining room, spread out, and eat from a fresh menu. We were just walking into the place when he brought her up again. "She must be okay," he said, "or she'd have gotten back to me right away." He was genuinely worried. More than the meet-the-deranged-celebrity thing. I'd known him for four years by then, and I still couldn't figure out how his mind worked. I'd have been interested to know what Selotta might have been able to tell me about him. It was unsettling to realize she'd only spent a few days with the guy and knew him far better than I ever would. Maybe that's the real reason people resent the Mutes so much. "She probably sobered up," I said. He looked at me with an expression that told me we both knew she hadn't been drinking. So I let it go, and the host led us to a corner table. We sat down beside a window. Brilliant splotches of light were spread across the globe. In the north, lightning glimmered. "Have you ever read any of her novels?" he asked. "No," I said. "Never had time." "Make time. She's good." "When did you read th
em?" "I read Dying to Know You on the way in." He took a moment to examine the menu. "Great stuff," he added. "You mean the food?" "I'm talking about Greene. I was surprised how good she is."

  "I like fiction that's a little more realistic." He went into his paternal mode. "You need to open your mind to new experiences, Chase." "I guess. You'd really like to meet her, wouldn't you?" "Yes," he said. "I would." "You get in trouble," I told him, "you're on your own."

  I was glad to see Ben Colbee again. Ben had twice proposed to me. All the signs were there. I saw passion in his eyes, watched him light up whenever I walked into a room. And I think I was in love with him, too. At least, I'd never felt about anybody else the way I felt about him. Ben was a good guy, sensitive, smart, good-looking, and he knew how to make me laugh. That's the big thing. Make me laugh. He was a musician. He played cornerstone with the Full Boat, which-he thought-was moving up and would shortly make him famous. That did eventually happen, but it's another story. Anyhow, Ben was waiting as I knew he would be when the shuttle got in. He offered to take Alex home, too, but Alex knows when he's an encumbrance, so he said no thanks, you guys go ahead, and threw his bags into a taxi and took off. We did some smooches, and Ben asked me how the flight had been and told me about the Full Boat's latest gig at the Sundown. Then, somewhere in there, he looked at me funny. "What's wrong, Chase?" "Nothing, Ben. Just a crank message we got on the way home." He asked me about it so I told him. I didn't mention who it was from, though. "This guy was a complete stranger?" he asked. "It was from a woman. And yes, she was nobody we knew." "Not one of your customers, right? Somebody you maybe forgot about?" "No, Ben. Not somebody we forgot about." He rolled his eyes. "Crazy people everywhere. I wouldn't worry about it." We left Andiquar behind and headed out over the western hills. And, to make a long story short, I wasn't very receptive to his advances, not at all what he'd expected when I'd been gone almost three weeks. Hell, not what I'd expected. And I don't think it had anything to do with Alex and the crazy woman. I'm not sure what it was. I had a feeling we were approaching another one of those moments when Ben was going to pour out his heart to me. I'd been gone a long time, and he'd missed me, and-well, you know. And as much as I liked him, loved him, whatever, I wanted to head it off. So I explained I wasn't much in the mood. Tired. Long trip. He deflated and said okay, he'd see me the next day. If that was all right. "You know," he added, "you're gone a lot." "I know." "I mean, Chase, you're gone all the time." "I'm sorry, Ben. I can't help that. It's my job." He took me into his arms. It was a bear hug, delicious because he meant it, disconcerting because I didn't want it to go any further. He hung on to me, squeezed tight, his cheek against mine. "It's not the only job in the world, you know. There are others." "Ben, I like this job. I mean, I really like it." "I know. But we don't get to see each other for weeks at a time. Is that really what you want?" He released me, and I stepped back and looked into those puppy-dog brown eyes. All right, I know how this sounds. But the truth is my heart picked up, and I was damned if I knew what I wanted.

  When he was gone, I looked up Vicki Greene. Carmen, my AI, gave me the basic information. She was thirty-three years old, born on the other side of the continent, currently based in Andiquar. She'd written six wildly successful novels, of which three had won the coveted Tasker Award, given each year for the most outrageous horror novel. She had master's degrees in history and mathematics, which struck me as an odd combination, and had been awarded an honorary doctorate the previous year by Tai Peng University. "What else, Carmen?"

  "Her most recent novel is Midnight and Roses , about a young woman who lives in a house where the attic opens out into different dimensions. But only after midnight."

  "Okay."

  "She's prolific. Six novels in six years. Three of her novels have been converted into holocasts, and one, Love You to Death , into a musical." "What do we have on her family?"

  "Her mother left her husband and ran off with a philosophy professor when Vicki was three. She has an older brother. The philosophy professor brought the family east to take a faculty position at Benneval College." Benneval was two kilometers up the coast from Andiquar. "He died a few years ago. Apparently suffered from poor health his whole life."

  "So does she have an avatar I could speak with?"

  "Wouldn't Alex take offense if you got involved?"

  "I'd just be another reader. Talking to her about vampires."

  "I see. Well, it doesn't look as if it matters. She doesn't maintain an avatar."

  "You're kidding. She's a major-league writer, and she's not in the program?

  "Apparently not."

  That's one of the odd things about avatars. You can go online, and you can talk to people across the ages who are effectively lost, people who were born, got married, had kids, provided a living, and did all the usual stuff. Their avatars are there, ready to talk to you about the time they cut down the elm, or the day Aunt Jenny fell into the creek. But a lot of the movers and shakers, you can't find. (I should admit here that there's a Chase Kolpath avatar. She looks pretty good, and she's ready to discuss antiquities and some of the stuff I've done with Alex. But hardly anybody ever talks to it. I stopped checking the hit count years ago.) I also looked up Hassan Goldman , the name emblazoned on Greene's shirt. I'd assumed it was a corporate logo, but it matched no company anywhere on Rimway. There were some individuals with the name, but none who seemed a likely candidate for putting it on a blouse. "So," I asked, "what has she been doing recently?"

  "Ah, that's what's interesting. According to information put out by her publisher, she's been on Salud Afar."

  "Salud Afar?"

  "Yes."

  Salud Afar was appropriately named. It was easily the most remote human world, thirty-one thousand light-years beyond Rimway. Out in the galactic boondocks. People generally thought about Rimway as being far out, the place on the edge of the Milky Way. But Salud Afar was the real outpost, located in empty-skies country, out there all by itself. For most of its history it had been months away from the closest human worlds. It had never joined the Confederacy. "Why was she on Salud Afar?" I asked.

  "Gathering material for a book, according to my best information. Or possibly just vacationing. The data is contradictory."

  "Her next book is set on Salud Afar?"

  "The data is incomplete."

  "What's it about?"

  "No information there either. Only that she's off chasing werewolves."

  "You're kidding."

  "That's what it says. Chase, that's a phrase used by people in the horror industry. It simply means somebody's out taking time off."

  Alex always insisted I take a few days to chase werewolves myself after an off-world mission. That was the official stance. In reality, when we got home after a flight, there was invariably a lot to do. So I'd show up as usual and take my vacation time at leisure. Rainbow Enterprises, as I've mentioned elsewhere, operated out of the country house in which Alex

  grew up. The area had been mostly forest then, along the banks of the Melony. A cemetery lay off the western perimeter. In fact, the house had been a retreat for hunters when Alex's uncle Gabe lived there. Now, it's surrounded by private homes and parks. There's a church at the foot of Amity Avenue, two blocks away, and a sports complex a half mile east. It snowed the first night home. I've always liked snowstorms. Don't get enough of them at our latitude, maybe one or two a year. Almost never anything heavy. This one was an exception. The neighborhood was buried. The cemetery had vanished, and the river was frozen. Because winter storms happen so seldom, nobody here has any kind of clearing device. Including Rainbow Enterprises. So I descended into my usual parking spot and climbed out into snowbanks up to my knees. I struggled through them to the front door. It was just after nine, and I could hear Alex upstairs in his office. Our usual routine was that Jacob, the AI, would inform him I'd arrived, and he'd say hello through the system. Then, an hour or so later, he'd wander down to greet me in person and give me the day's assignme
nts. This time he didn't bother to call. A few minutes later, he started down the stairs. And stopped halfway. "Got a minute?" he asked. "Sure, Alex. Anything wrong?" "Yes." Scary way to start a conversation. "What happened?" He came the rest of the way down, walked slowly into the main room, where we entertain, and lowered himself into a chair. "While we were gone, Rainbow picked up an unexpected deposit." "Somebody gave us some money?" "Not some . A lot ." "And that's bad ? Who did it?" "Vicki Greene." "What? Why?" "The statement doesn't say. She just had it credited to our account. Four days ago." Okay. She was going to hire us for something. "How much?" "Two million." That took my breath away. It would have taken Ilena Crane's Statement of Human Rights, the original document, to produce that kind of cash. "And she didn't tell us why?" "No." "Well, I guess we ought to call her again." "I've tried." "And-?" "Her AI says she's relocated. Permanently." "Where?" "'That information is not presently available.'" "So she gave us a pile of money and took a walk?" "Apparently." "Well, I'm sure we'll hear from her." "No doubt." "Alex-" "Yes? I'm listening." "She can't be that hard to find." "That's what I thought. But you're welcome to try." "Jacob did a general search?" "He did." Well, there is a privacy provision. If you don't want to be listed in the register, you're not listed. "Look, she's certainly going to contact us. I suggest we just wait for her to make the next move." He wasn't happy. Alex likes to make money as much as the next guy, but he doesn't like things hanging over his head.