The Captain stood sipping his liquor in the midst of the party from the Princess Cecile, ignoring—apparently unaware—of the by-play among them. Daniel turned to him and, gesturing a rigger named Nussbaum closer with his just-refilled bucket of slash, said, “Captain, is that jewel on the old Lieutenant’s lap going to be given away also? And say, why don’t you have another glass of slash?”
The Captain gulped down the last of what was in his mug, then doubled up coughing. Daniel worked the mug out of his grip and gave it to Nussbaum to dip full. The native straightened and drank again, but with proper care.
The dead man’s son whipped more money from the pile; Adele took her left hand out of her pocket and relaxed. Whatever the object was, it wasn’t a diamond.
Now that she could see almost the whole thing, an engraved sphere a foot in diameter, she wasn’t even sure it was mineral. It had the opalescence of a soap bubble rather than a diamond’s sharp refractions. Besides, the Earth Diamond was supposed to be flawless. Granted that historians might gild reality, even a politician would’ve choked before claiming purity for an object so translucently milky.
“Ah, the Sky Ball,” the Captain said. He leaned down and wriggled his free hand under the sphere to lift it from the strings of money. The other natives continued with their business, unconcerned by what was happening. “It stays in Captain’s House, except when officer dies.”
He handed it to Daniel. Before Daniel could pass it to the Klimovna, she snatched it greedily away from him.
“It’s light!” she said. “But—Georgi, look at this! It’s not a diamond, but it’s carved with the continents of Earth as they were before the Hiatus. Is it not?”
“Daniel, hold this for me,” Adele said curtly as she handed him her data unit. She couldn’t hold it and operate it at the same time, so in lieu of a table in this present need her friend’s hands would have to do. Her wands flickered, retrieving the image of the Earth Diamond, the real one, where she’d cached it. She projected it as an omnidirectional hologram in the air beside the clumsy fake that the Klimovna held.
“Waugh!” said the Captain, jerking backward. His feet didn’t move as they might have done ten ounces of slash ago; he’d have fallen if Hogg hadn’t caught him around the shoulders with the reflex of long experience in dealing with drunks.
“In addition to the obvious differences in outline . . . ,” Adele said. The “continents” on the Sky Ball could’ve been outlined by a child drawing in mud with his fingers. “You’ll note that the Earth Diamond is etched on the interior of the sphere by an artist working through a pinhole at the North Pole.”
She expanded the northernmost ten degrees of the image, then rotated it to bring the concave interior into view. The Captain stared at the transformations with the complete amazement of a man seeing a pig walk down the street on its hind legs.
“Whereas this object, the Sky Ball . . . ,” Adele continued. She needed to record imagery of the object, she realized as she spoke. “Is carved on the outer surface in the normal fashion.”
“It appears to be of vegetable origin,” Daniel said, frowning. He straightened, looking across the faces turned to his. “Though the important fact is that whatever its origin—and I assume it’s local—it could only have been made by somebody who’d seen the Earth Diamond. John Tsetzes or at least the loot he escaped from Novy Sverdlovsk with has been here on Morzanga.”
“Can we buy it?” the Count said, looking troubled.
“It’s trash!” Valentina said angrily. “Why would we want to make fools of ourselves?”
She shoved the ball back at the Captain. Startled and unprepared, he’d have let it hit the ground had not Daniel snatched it as it fell.
Valentina’s fierce eyes locked on the Captain’s. “Where did this come from?” she demanded. “Do you have the original it was carved from?”
“It’s from seaweed that floats up on the beach of the big water three days journey toward sunset,” the native said. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with the back of the hand that didn’t hold the mug of liquor. “This is very big bubble, though. Nobody ever has seen so big a one again.”