by Allen Wold
"I was wondering when you'd find out about that," Gawin said. They were standing beside a meter-tall model of a castle from the second medieval period of Far Cantroe, a simple circular tower that opened to reveal a succession of floors and cellars stacked within walls that were half the radius of the tower in thickness.
"Mother never said anything about it," Rikard said.
"She tried to divorce herself from her past as much as possible. She was cut out of the line of inheritance, and so she rejected her family the way we rejected her."
"You didn't reject her."
"No. But I didn't do anything to help either. Nor did I have the courage to do so. Your grandfather is used to absolute power. As a planetary ruler, he's better than most, but he carries his prerogatives over into his personal relationships. He's not an easy man to live with. Fortunately for your grandmother, she's just like him."
"And all this time, I thought Mother was poor."
"She was. When she left, she took nothing with her. She was planning on coming back to get some personal things, but Father forbade it. The jewelry she wore wasn't all that valuable. Your father was her sole provider."
"Until the money ran out. But why did she keep such a secret?"
"She was ashamed, I think. Think about how you feel about my father casting his youngest child out the way he did."
"I don't like to think about it."
"Neither did Sigra. And she had more reason than you. She'd been kidnapped for ransom, and they were about to start sending body parts back to Father to prove they meant business. Father never even considered paying the ransom. It would have made him feel weak. And then I suggested your father might be able to do something, and Father agreed to it, and I was right. And Father reneged. So how does Sigra feel. Father wouldn't pay her ransom, or pay her rescuer. I don't say she married your father because of that, they were truly in love I think. But it surely made it easy for her to forget her past, to be ashamed of it, and to ask me to never speak of it, especially after you were born. She preferred that you never knew about her shame."
"I guess I can't blame her." He closed the tower model and turned to another, with battlemented walls and spires, only half a meter tall but nearly a square meter in extent. "You knew I'd find out, didn't you?"
"I figured you would."
Grayshard stood a couple meters away to Rikard's right. His face was turned toward a gray stone model. His attention was who knew where. Droagn hung farther back, watching and listening but tactfully removed from the discussion.
"Is that why you invited me here?" Rikard asked after a long pause.
"I invited you here because when you were a child I enjoyed your company, and when you were a young man, and when I met you again on Mensenear I was proud to think that someone like you was my nephew. Most of my family aren't very nice people. I thought we might pick up where we left off."
Rikard looked his uncle in the eye. "And you took the chance that I'd find out the truth about Mother and not hate you for it."
"I did."
"Well. I'm glad you did."
Rikard and Gawin embraced, and then let the subject lie. They looked at a few more castles, in which Droagn was very interested, though Grayshard just politely followed along until they came to one that was tall and airy and almost fairy like, which captured the Vaashka's attention completely.
But at last it was time to get ready for dinner, which this evening was held in a large, dark hall, lit by torches that actually burned. Once again there was company for dinner, just one guest this time, a friend of Gawin's named Isakar Mendoza, from Total Foam. He had just stopped by to visit on his way to Higginsplanet, and provided the party with plenty of distractions from both family secrets and the business of art dealing. Rikard was grateful for this, though it couldn't stop him from thinking about it.
After dinner they looked at a selection of sculpture that Gawin kept in a separate wing. Most of it was erotic in nature. Rikard's personal thoughts continued to distract him, though some of the sculptures were quite surprising, in subject, representation, medium, or execution. It got him through until bedtime.
* * * *
Next morning Rikard and his friends and Isakar Mendoza were on their own again, and Andrefs directed them to the game room where they tried out a few of the better known and some of the more obscure entertainments. Here there was billiards in a variety of forms, single and double combat simulators, a tabletop orbital simulator contest, as well as poker, chess, backgammon, fleece, man choi, go, and a variety of manual board games and computerized strategy games. Rikard did his best to be sociable.
They had lunch with Gawin, after which he showed them his collection of succulent plants from many worlds. This was what Mendoza had come for. He wanted to trade a few examples he had picked up on Lucerne for cuttings of some of Gawin's prize specimens.
It took a good part of the afternoon to go through the six hectares or so of greenhouse, and then Gawin had to go off again, and his four guests retreated to the pool.
Mendoza, as it turned out, was the publisher of Ruehlmann Press, one of the largest specialty publishers in the Federation, and was rather cautiously curious about Rikard in particular and Gestae in general. Rikard kept on protesting his scholarship as an historian, and countered with questions about Mendoza's selection of books. They kept up the friendly bantering until dinnertime.
Three other guests showed up for dinner, which this evening was held on an open balcony under a crystal-clear sky. Two of these were personal friends of Gawin's, Lyle Green and Stuart Saparretti, from Kernig, a distant city on Malvrone, and the third was Marcella Diangello, a representative of the Clark University on Doyle. Green and Saparretti were there purely to be social, but Diangello wanted Gawin to handle the university's excess collections to see what he could get. Business and small talk mingled easily and it was a very pleasant evening.
But later, while everybody was occupied in one of Gawin's media centers, Rikard took his uncle to one side. "I've been thinking about this all day long," he said.
"I'd be surprised if you hadn't," Gawin told him gently.
"It's such an obvious thing, and yet it took me until just a few minutes ago to realize that when Grandfather refused to pay my father for rescuing Mother, it wasn't because he didn't have the money."
The three-dimensional images went through their motions in the stage. It was a recently popular film that Rikard had not yet seen. Somehow Gawin had gotten a copy before its home release.
"You're right," Gawin said. "It was because he sort of felt that people owed it to him to do things for him, and besides, since the deal hadn't gone down the way it had been arranged, Father didn't feel obliged to pay."
"But he had made the deal," Rikard said. "Half the ransom if Dad got Mom back alive. And he did it. So he single-handedly killed all the kidnappers in the process, how did that relieve Grandfather from his responsibility?"
"It didn't, but Father felt that way. I'm not making excuses, Rikard, I'm just trying to explain."
"I'm sorry."
"Your mother felt bad about that too, as I told you before. Especially since she and Arin sort of hit it off from the start. They had two weeks to get back here from Emblethon, and I guess they got to know each other pretty well during that time. I think Sigra had been planning on your father coming around to call in the usual way, and on Father being very grateful and all. And when that didn't happen, she got hold of Arin and arranged discreetly to meet him. Father found out and threatened to disown her, but she married Arin anyway.
"Father kept track of her for a long time after that. I came to visit whenever I could, but it wasn't easy getting away from Father without his knowing where I was going. He caught me once and I'm not going to tell you what he did to me when I got back. And then Sigra died, and Father took me aside and told me and expressly forbade me from going to the funeral."
"But you did."
"And that was when Nevile Beneking was first creat
ed."
Rikard sat quietly for a moment, watching the adventure unfolding in the stage. "So," he said at last, "I guess there's not much chance that Grandfather will ever approve of me."
"I guess not," Gawin said.
* * * *
Isakar Mendoza was there for breakfast the next morning, though he had to leave immediately after. Gawin did not mention the subject of Rikard's parents during the meal, and neither did Rikard. Afterward, as he had only light business that morning, he took Rikard, Grayshard, and Droagn to his office.
"Father doesn't like his children to work," Gawin explained, "unless it's the business of running Malvrone. I have absolutely no interest in that. Braice wants the job and he can have it. None of us was trained to make any use of our lives else, so I'm rather proud of my reputation in the art world, and the fact that I can bring it off in spite of Father's disapproval. And here is where I do most of the work."
He then proceeded to show off how he could establish market connections anywhere in the Federation and on a number of worlds outside. He had a powerful and complex comcon setup, with multiple screens, printers, direct interstellar communications, powerful computers both dedicated and general, and a huge database.
As his three guests watched he found a buyer for one of the Clark University's excesses. As that was concluding he got a want for Andaluthian sand sculpture. Then he found a buyer for some of Lei Ffraab's early works, which had come back on the market on the death of their owner. He was just playing at being a dealer this morning, nothing very serious. He located a collection of rare stamps and bid on it. While waiting for the next round he found a sand sculpture and got back to the party that wanted it. He arranged for a three-way trade of various items between two universities and a municipal museum to their mutual benefit and his. The request for the sculpture got back and said they wanted something different. His bid for the stamps was topped and he bid again. It was, he explained somewhat smugly, practically a morning off.
Neither Droagn nor Grayshard had any personal or professional interest in dealing in art, but Rikard became more and more intrigued as each transaction showed off something more about the huge database. "You've got an awful lot of information in there," he said. "This system is far more sophisticated than what I'm familiar with, and I've seen quite a bit on various worlds,"
"You're not going to find one like this anywhere else," Gawin said, "except at my place on Tarantor. I've taken advantage of what the Vadime of Soler Prikus have to offer. Perhaps you've heard of them."
"I'm afraid I haven't."
"They're a minor member of the Federation. They don't travel much. Quite interesting, really, an arthropod race that nonetheless superficially resemble Humans, the way your friend Grayshard does—as long as they have their clothes on. They're established on only their home system and two others. Most of their technology is on a low par with the rest of the Federation, but their computer and communications systems are maybe half a century in advance of the best of anything else we have. They control their exports but, well, I managed to obtain a functional prototype."
Rikard's attention was no longer on the data retrieval system, and there was something in his face that made his uncle pause. "Mother always told me," Rikard said at last, "that her family had more titles than money."
"Was that the way she put it?" Gawin asked apprehensively.
"She lied to me all those years," Rikard said softly.
"That's the logical conclusion one must come to, considering what we've said so far about the subject. What are you getting at?"
"Dad went broke, and went off looking for one last treasure, and never came back. But he didn't have to go off, did he? Could Mom have asked Grandfather for money?"
Gawin sat back in his chair. He didn't like the direction this conversation was taking. "I don't know, but I think that probably she could have."
"Would he have given it to her?"
"If he'd thought her asking for money was a way of admitting her error, yes, I think he would have."
"So she was too proud?"
"In many ways your mother was as much of a misfit in this family as I am, but she shared one thing with Father, and that was her pride. Father kept track of Sigra until then. But when Arin went off without your mother coming to him, he broke off the connection for good."
"Did my father know Mom could have gotten money?"
Gawin sighed. "You're a lot more like your mother than your father, in some ways," he said. "Your father was basically a happy man, restless, but content with whatever the world handed him, and not afraid to take a chance to improve his position. He didn't care who had money, who had power, who had position, he treated them all the same. I don't think he really knew or cared what kind of wealth my father had, only that he didn't keep his word. If he could have gone on living in the kind of comfort to which he liked Sigra to be accustomed, he wouldn't have minded where the money came from."
"So Mom could have bailed them out if she'd wanted to."
"She could have."
"But she didn't, and because of that Dad went off, and didn't come back, and Mom died of a broken heart..."
"Yes," Gawin said gently, "compounded by guilt."
Rikard sat silently for a long moment, then said, "How much can this database tell us about those cyclopean cones?"
"I'm not sure," Gawin said, "I hadn't thought about it."
"Like, are the cones on Dannon's Keep the only ones? Are there cones on other worlds? Does this database have any information on the cyclopeans at all? Can you query it by showing it the few things I brought back with me?"
Rikard may have intended the change of subject as merely a diversion, but the questions were legitimate, and now it was Gawin's turn to be interested. "I've tapped into every art, anthropological, sociological, archeological, and historical database I could," he said. "I know of nobody else with a base as extensive as mine. And I'll have to tell you, there might be things in there nobody would think to look for, until now."
They started to ask the system questions, beginning with the obvious, for which they got only tantalizing hints. They scanned in images of Rikard's trophies and asked more questions. Still the answers were only suggestions of possibilities. But Droagn and Grayshard began to pay attention.
Gawin had someone bring them the archaeology text Rikard had retrieved from the buried Ahmear city, found the seven pictures that showed the cones, and scanned those in. The system chuckled a bit, and when it started answering— it was still only hints, though now they were becoming a bit more positive.
Then Grayshard said, "Why don't you feed it the recording you made?" and he handed Rikard his helmet, which a servant had just brought to him. "I thought you might want it," he said.
Rikard plugged it into Gawin's system and they looked through some of the recordings and fed them into the database.
Now their questions brought more elaborate responses, though still mostly cryptical, incomplete, and nonspecific. But these hints clued them in to better questions. During the next few hours they sifted through terabytes of information and at last started to get the kind of answers they were looking for.
It turned out that there were records of several dozen worlds with eroded cones of marble, all of which were assumed to have been natural. They were distributed on worlds in an irregular arc through the Federation, with no indication as to the origin. But the world with the most structures was called Tsikashka.
"Then that's where we have to go," Rikard said.
"I would think so," Grayshard agreed, "assuming that we want to find out more about those people."
"You think he could let it alone" Droagn asked.
"And what happens when you get there?" Gawin asked. "You look for more artifacts?"
"Of course," Rikard said. "Anything that will help me discover who those people were, and that I can present to the academic community as proof of my discovery."
"You're forgetting one thing," Gawin said. "Karyl Toer
son got to you twice before, and she seemed to have a pretty good idea of what you were after. She may try to ambush you again."
"She won't get away with it this time," Rikard said.
"Look," Gawin said, "I want you to be careful. Toerson is bad business. I know. Be careful. If you can bring stuff out without her interfering, that's fine, bring it to Mensenear. I'll instruct the people there to accommodate you when and if you show up. Don't bring it here.
"But Toerson may get to you no matter what you do. She's been at this a lot longer than you have. If she does, let it go. It's not worth your life if you push her too hard.
"And whatever happens, come visit me again. It's great having family that I can actually talk to."
"It is that," Rikard said with a grin.
Tsikashka
1
Many worlds produce life, and some of these living worlds produce intelligent life. A few intelligent species develop a technology, and in potential at least could become starfaring. It has happened many times.
The scope of space is such that in the Federation, by no means the largest of star nations, there are dozens of these starfaring species, though Humans are the most numerous by far. And in the scope of time, from the first sentient Taarshome—whose origins are so far back toward the beginning of the cosmos that their age can hardly be counted— until today, there have been many more starfaring nations than presently exist. It is a truism that more species of life are extinct than survive. Time is so long and space so large.
Tsikashka was a world on which a sparse life had evolved, but it produced no forms above the relative level of arthropod, though some of those species might seem quite advanced by comparison with similar forms on other worlds. And yet Tsikashka had been home, from time to time, of several starfaring species of people, though none of who existed in the Federation today. Indeed, none of them had survived more than a few thousands of years after learning how to travel between the stars. In some cases, the home worlds of these species were known. In more cases the long dead colonies on Tsikashka were the only remaining examples.
