That was the source of the excitement, of course: Although he would never die of old age, he could still die. Burning up in atmosphere would obliterate him beyond reconstruction. When down came baby, crashcradle and all, all the king's motelings and all the king's mends couldn't put baby together again.
You never get over it. At best you just get around it.
The satellite's airlock doors dilated open. The docking bay railgun shot him on his board out of the bay, toward the mottled ocher, white, and blue of the Earth below. He howled happily as he kicked in his thrusters to maximum burn.
Hisao shifted on the board and trajectories altered on the fashionably retro heads-up displays of his suit helmet. The astrogation gear calced Earth-atmosphere clearance for each course change, along with the board's capabilities and his own survivability.
The thrusters cut out. The board's ablative shielding began to burn. He moved back in the footlocks, angling both his board's nose and his trajectory slightly upward. On his rearview cams a long fiery streak spooled out, man and board a shooting star pushing a redlining course.
Fall to miss, fall to miss, fall to miss! Think like a satellite!
On his burning plank he bolided through the upper air, arced off just before his trajectory would have reached extinction point, skipped back out of the atmosphere, and was gone.
Despite tiles glowing red hot, empty fuel tanks, and a board blown of all ablative shielding and still burning, the trajectory plotter moved back into the green—before the astrogation system blew out. The locator beacon still worked, though, even as he slingzagged farther from the Earth, dropping final fire behind him.
Hisao drifted, staring down at the shining planet below. Each year, the human population of that world declined steadily—and not just from emigration, he now knew. On the face of the Sahara, carved into its skin, he could just make out through thin clouds a male figure, waving—though whether hello or good-bye he could not tell.
Waiting for a recovery shuttle to ride in on his beam and pick him up, Hisao knew he'd pushed himself and the board—hard. Yet the edge, he realized, was already going. Even from such a wild ride. Even from astrosurfing itself.
Life goes on. And on. And on.
I feel nothing. And nothing lasts forever.
That's the sheer hell of it.
In overcoming human death, had the moteswarms also overcome something essential to human life? How long could he keep going, before the edge was so gone he stepped over it? Before he fell to hit, and failed to miss?
I could still die....
Below him, the planet was perfect, its people star children of an endless midsummer evening. But if the stars were fixed, why were they still falling, secretly, one by one?
He shivered amid the heavens, and the heavens shivered with him.
Copyright © 2009 Howard V. Hendrix
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Novelette: THE AFFAIR OF THE PHLEGMISH MASTER
by Donald Moffitt
Even if you can't change the past, you may be able to use it....
Peter Van Gaas stared resignedly at the dusty leather tome on the desk in front of him. De ondekkingsreis van Willem Hesselz de Vlamingh in de jaren 1696-1697. Yet another interminable job of translation to slog through for the history of the Dutch East India Company that he was already past deadline on.
He was reaching for his Dutch-English dictionary when the phone rang. He was tempted to ignore it—it might be his publisher again—but he finally succumbed.
“Hello, is this Peter Van Gaas?” It was a voice he didn't recognize.
“Yes,” he said cautiously. “Who's this?”
“This is Roy Hendricks at Alternatives Associates. I got your name out of the Time Travelers’ Register of Translators. You do Dutch, right?”
“Well, uh, yes, but...”
“Know anything about art?”
“Not very much. You see, my specialty is—”
“It doesn't matter. The client will know even less. You'll be there chiefly to hold his hand and smooth things over when he puts his foot in his mouth.”
“If you could tell me what this is about, Mr.—Hendricks, was it?”
“Call me Roy. You're going to go back to seventeenth century Delft and translate for the client while he makes a deal to commission a painting. Piece of cake.”
“I'm awfully busy right now. I'm not sure I can—”
“Have you ever done time travel before, Peter?”
“No,” he said regretfully. He'd often wished he could afford a trip to the past to clear up some small point of research, the way the A-list historians were always doing, but the kind of books he wrote didn't have a lot of popular appeal. His publisher had told him that the East India Company book might be his breakthrough.
“The way it works, you'll spend weeks or months in Delft till the job's done—an alternate Delft, of course, that you and Harry create by going back there—and return to the present a fraction of a second after you've left. You won't lose a moment's time on your own work. You'll have a free ride in case there's anything you want to do in the seventeenth century yourself. And—” He lowered his voice confidentially. “—with Harry, of course, the money's going to be out of sight.”
“Harry?”
“Harry Brock, the celebrity developer. He'll be a shark out of water in seventeenth century Delft. That's where you come in. You've heard of him, I'm sure.”
Indeed Peter had. The hotels, the casinos, the Sea City project, the twelve trophy wives, the omninet specials, the tabloid scandals, and more.
He took a last despairing look at the rat's nest of scribbled notes and moldy old books on his desk and gave a sigh. “Okay, Roy, I'm in.”
“Great!” Hendricks said. “You can meet Harry tomorrow. Be here at one. Maybe we can get him to take us to lunch.”
* * * *
The offices of Alternatives Associates were a study in spare elegance, with sleek upholstered furniture and expensive veneers. A series of gold-framed oil paintings depicting turning points in history lined the walls of the waiting room. Peter was studying a scene that showed Columbus doing his famous egg trick for Queen Isabella when Roy Hendricks emerged from a door in the rear. He said, “Nice to meet you, Peter,” but didn't bother to shake hands. “Harry's waiting for us in the Pit,” he said. “Don't say too much. Let him do the talking.”
Peter followed Hendricks down a carpeted corridor into a dim cavern filled with wall-to-wall monitor screens and a lot of incomprehensible electronic equipment. A scattering of technicians in green smocks, mostly women, sat at their own screens tapping intermittently at their keyboards. Across the expanse of consoles, a stocky man in loud, expensive sports clothes stood with his back to them, engrossed in one of the wall monitors. Hendricks led Peter over to him, and the man turned to reveal a red, jowly face and the best set of ivories that money could buy.
“Harry, this is your translator, Peter Van Gaas,” Hendricks said. “Peter, meet the one and only Harry Brock.”
Brock looked Peter over for a long speculative minute. Finally he parted with a practiced public grimace and said, “Howja do, Pete. Roy tells me you're some kind of whiz at passing yourself off as an ancient Dutchie.” He didn't offer to shake hands, and Peter remembered that Brock was supposed to have a phobia about germs.
“Well, uh, I wouldn't exactly call them ancient where we're going, but...” Peter floundered.
Hendricks stepped in quickly. “That he is. But more important, Peter happens to be an expert on Vermeer.”
“That's my boy!” Brock gave Peter a slap on the back that almost knocked him flat. He turned to Hendricks. “When do we start?”
“I know you're anxious to get started, Harry, but we've got a lot to do first. We've got to bring Peter up to speed. Get him to a good temporal costumer for starters—to say nothing of getting you and Kimberly outfitted...”
“Kimberly—ha!” Brock seemed amused. “She'll tak
e care of herself. She has her own fashion house. As for me, I'll have my tailor whip up something. Nothing but class all the way.”
“It's got to be authentic, Harry,” Hendricks said doubtfully. “We don't want you standing out like a sore thumb.”
Peter was alarmed to see Brock's face flush with instant rage. “I'm not going to go in some moth-eaten Halloween costume, Roy boy!” Brock rasped. “My tailor will take care of it. And I'd like to see somebody try to tell Kimberly what to wear!”
Peter began to see what he was in for, managing Harry Brock. He sighed and decided to make a good start of it. “Mr. Brocks got a good point, Roy,” he said. “He's going to have to pose as some sort of rich Englishman anyway—there were a million English dialects to account for his way of talking, not that Vermeer or any other Delftian would know the difference, or care very much. Same with his clothes. Authenticity doesn't matter as long as the tailoring makes him look rich.”
Brock's color returned to normal, and Roy Hendricks looked relieved. Peter got an unexpected pat on the cheek as a reward. “Listen to Pete, Roy,” Brock said expansively. “This boy has some kind of a head on his shoulders.”
Hendricks shot Peter an appreciative glance and went on blandly: “And then there's the money thing. We generally use the Moneta private mint in Philly. They do a good job of forgery, and they don't cheat on weight or purity. Peter can take care of that for you.”
“Okay, but I'm in charge of the till,” Brock said. “How much would you say, Pete?”
Peter had no idea what it was all about, but he said authoritatively, “A thousand guilders in silver ought to take care of it. Not counting living expenses.”
“Okay,” Brock said. He looked at his watch. “Gotta go. The press conference is in an hour. I can't keep Kimberly waiting. Nice to meet you, Pete.”
When he was gone, Peter turned to Hendricks and said, “Okay, Roy. Maybe now you can tell me what's going on.”
Roy scratched his nose. “You don't watch the vid much, do you, Peter?”
“No.”
“Kimberly's his latest wife. Number thirteen. He's nuts about her. You must've seen her face on the covers of all the gossip magazines. But you don't read them either, do you?”
“No.”
Roy looked at him pityingly. “She's a supermodel. A super-dooper supermodel. She's got her own fashion house. And her own retail knockoff line. Her own perfume brand. She's starred in a couple of movies Harry financed. Bombs, but her acting surprised the critics. There's nothing Harry wouldn't do to showcase her. So of course when he decided he wanted her portrait painted, it had to be Vermeer.”
“And I'm supposed to be a Vermeer expert? Listen, Roy...”
“Don't worry about it, Peter. I've arranged to have you briefed by Hugh Elphinstone, the art critic. I sent Harry to him for a briefing, but you saw Harry—he was too impatient to get anything out of it. The important thing is you know the language and you're halfway familiar with the era. You handled yourself well with Harry. You'll be a steadying influence on him.”
Peter didn't particularly care for the “halfway,” but he let it go. “What made him fixate on Vermeer? I gather he knows less about art than I do.”
“Somebody told him Vermeer was the best. And that he was somewhat of a rarity—there are only a few dozen of his paintings in existence. That was enough for Harry. Rembrandt wouldn't do. Too many Rembrandts around.”
“What was that about a press conference?”
“He's been talking it up. Harry can't keep his mouth shut. He's been talking it up on his game show and his puff interviews for weeks. If you weren't such a bookworm, you'd have caught some of it. The press conference will make it official. His P.R. firm's cobbled together a big presentation—slide show, press kit, and the works.”
“Maybe I should go.”
“I'll get you one of the press kits. And the giveaway that goes with it—a framed print of ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring,’ one of Vermeer's hits. You can skip the conference. It'll be a madhouse anyway. Harry will announce that he's going to be the owner of the world's forty-first Vermeer, or whatever the number is. Then the fur's going to fly.”
“Why is that?”
Roy made a grimace. “Harry's going to upset a multibillion dollar applecart. I don't know what strings he pulled to get an import license for a priceless artifact from another timeline, but it's not going to be worth what he thinks. Coming from another timeline, it won't have a provenance that means anything in this one. Not by the same Vermeer, y'see. But it'll depress the market for Vermeers and Dutch and Flemish paintings in general. The art market's pretty upset about it, let me tell you.”
“It's beyond me,” Peter said, his eyes threatening to glaze over. I would have thought that if Vermeer's such a big deal, there would have been any number of enterprising dealers bringing in new ones ever since the time travel industry was born.”
“Oh, there've been a few attempts to import new Vermeers over the years, but they all seem to fall through somehow. Maybe they weren't as determined as Harry.”
“I still don't understand why Harry's such a threat to the art market.”
“I'll let Elphinstone explain it to you. He's got you booked for three o'clock.”
* * * *
Hugh Elphinstone was a dwarfish man with a tight cap of curly black hair. More black hair sprouted from his nostrils. He sat crouched behind and ornate desk piled with art books and prints.
“I envy you, Dr. Van Gaas,” he said. “To go back in time and meet Vermeer himself. To visit his studio and see how he works. Maybe to discover once and for all how he applied his glazes to such effect. To see what role the camera obscura might have played in his work...”
“I'm afraid it wouldn't mean much of anything to me,” Peter said. “I wouldn't know a glaze if I saw one.”
“Yes, yes,” Elphinstone said wearily. “You want to know a little about Vermeer and how to approach him, so that Mr. Brock won't make a fool of himself.”
“I'd appreciate it,” Peter said.
“Mr. Brock is an overbearing man, yes? He will try to dictate to Vermeer how he wants his wife posed, how she is dressed, what expression he wants on her face. That will not work. Vermeer will be very polite. But he will be very stubborn. For him, the model will be an element in the composition—one element in a serene and mysterious universe of objects arranged just so. He will have certain favorite props. Perhaps he will want to dress Mrs. Brock in items of his wife's clothing and jewelry that appear in some of his other paintings. He did not like to paint portraits as such.”
“He did, sort of, in ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring,'” Peter said, drawing on his newly gleaned knowledge from Harry Brock's press kit. He had found the painting strangely moving.
“Yes, you might say that,” Elphinstone admitted. “Very unusual for Vermeer. No background at all. But I doubt that's what Harry has in mind. He'll want recognizable signature props from Vermeer's bag of tricks, like the Oriental rug that appears so many times. And he'll want a signature itself, to rub in everyone's faces. That represents another problem. Vermeer didn't usually sign his paintings. Only three of his paintings are signed.” He shot Peter a sharp look. “How much are you paying him, by the way?”
“I ... uh, that is we ... thought we'd offer him a thousand guilders.”
Elphinstone raised a bushy eyebrow. “He'll sign his name for that. He was usually in debt. Vermeer and his fellow painters didn't usually paint to order. They cranked out their pictures like sausages and sold them ready-made at fairs and such. The good burghers of Delft had a newly acquired taste for cozy scenes of daily life, and the painters obliged. Vermeer was a dealer as well as an artist, and made most of his money selling other men's work. Of course the art business in Delft collapsed after the French invasion in 1672, and Vermeer went bankrupt. It killed him three years later. But that won't affect your business, of course. Your little trip will take place some years before all that happened, if I understan
d Roy Hendricks correctly.”
“Uh, I wouldn't know about that,” Peter said.
“Oh, but you must know something about the flavor of the times. I read your excellent book about the Dutch-English naval wars. Fascinating, but a bit dry.”
“Thank you—I think.”
Elphinstone had the grace to laugh. “The point is that you and Harry Brock will be received warmly as Englishmen, despite the bloodshed on the high seas. The Anglo-Dutch wool trade was one of the foundations of Delftian prosperity no matter what was going on in the East Indies. Leeuwenhoek carried on a cordial correspondence with the Royal Society of London for more than fifty years.”
“Leeuwenhoek?”
“The inventor of the microscope. He was a close friend of Vermeer's—served as Vermeer's model for a couple of paintings. He was Vermeer's executor during the bankruptcy proceedings years later. Perhaps you'll have a chance to meet him. He'd make a good subject for one of your books.”
Peter's head was awhirl. “I've got enough on my plate right now,” he said.
Elphinstone laughed again. This time the laugh was not pleasant. “You do indeed,” he said. “When you get back, you're not going to be very popular with the art establishment.”
* * * *
There were twelve of them seated around the big rosewood conference table, eleven men and a woman in a big hat. The men were dressed in a range of attire, from somber business suits to discreetly expensive sports jackets and flowery silk neckties. They showed a similar range of grooming, from exquisite barbering to bushy mustaches and beards. The woman wore a mask of thick age-concealing makeup that looked as if a hammer and chisel would be needed to crack it.
The man at the head of the table was one of those with a business suit and defensive barbering. He called the meeting to order with an ivory hammer that had been carved from an illegal whale's tooth; traces of nineteenth century scrimshaw could still be seen on its surface.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “I presume you've all seen the publicity for the Brock Vermeer splashed all over the media.”
Analog SFF, June 2009 Page 18
