“Is she expecting you, Inspector?”—smooth and cold, definitely uncooperative . . .
The receptionist’s name was engraved on a solid gold pin beneath her throat, a pin that would have been invisible to ordinary eyes. Not to Sparta’s.
One talent of a better-than-average cop is to be able to say more than one thing at once; some simple statements carry a wealth of implication (obey me or go to jail), and the first-name trick never hurts, even if it only makes ’em mad. “I require your full cooperation, Barbara.”
Barbara responded with a jerk, freezing the image on the handheld videoplate she’d been consulting.
“I’m here to see Sondra Sylvester on urgent official business,” Sparta told her, “regarding The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.”
The receptionist stiffly poked out a three-digit code and spoke softly to the gadget. A moment later Sylvester’s lush, husky voice filled the room. “Bring Inspector Troy to my office at once.” The young receptionist lost her hauteur.
“Follow me, please,” she whispered.
Sparta followed her through double locking panels that slid silently aside. One curving hall led to another, and that soon opened upon scenes of Escherlike ambiguity: below Sparta and beside her, curving smoky windows overlooked control rooms peopled by dozens of operators in front of green and orange flatscreens and videoplates.
Other curving glass corridors crossed above and below, and other control rooms were visible through distant windows.
Many of the screens Sparta could see displayed graphics or columns of numbers, but on others live video pictures of a bizarre fishbowl world unreeled like the view from a carnival ride.
Somewhere on the surface of the planet below—on the bright visible side or away in the darkness beyond the terminator—radio signals relayed by synchronous satellites moved robots by remote control, to prospect, to delve, to mill, and to stockpile. The views through the moving screens were robot-eye views of hell.
Abruptly they were past the control rooms. Sparta followed the receptionist through a door, down another corridor, and finally into an office of such opulence that Sparta hesitated before entering.
A desk of polished chalcedony stood before a wall of rough-textured, curving bronze. Ruddy light fell fitfully over the surface of the wall, illuminating statues in their niches, exquisite works by the solar system’s major artists: a duplicate cast of Fricca’s Ishtar, flanked by Innanna, Astarte, Cybele, Mariana, Aphrodite, Lakshmi. Another wall contained shelf upon shelf of books bound in colored leather and stamped with gold and silver. Through heavily filtered windows the sulfurous clouds of the planet rolled in twilight.
It was a room that spoke, paradoxically, of despair—a prison, its static luxuries meant to substitute for the random simplicities of freedom.
“You may leave us, Barbara.”
Sparta turned to find Sylvester behind her, wearing the same dark silk gown she’d worn disembarking from Helios.
And when Sparta glanced around, the receptionist had gone; these women had an uncanny trick of moving silently.
Sparta found herself wishing that Proboda had made his appearance.
“You’re much smaller than I expected, Inspector Troy.”
“Videoplate images have that effect.”
“And I have no doubt you intended the effect,” Sylvester said. She crossed the carpeted room to her stone desk and sat down. “Normally I’d ask you to make yourself comfortable, but in fact I am extremely busy just now. Or “No.”
“What can I tell you about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom?”
Sparta realized that she was too tired to work at subtlety; the directness of her question surprised even her.
“How much did you spend counterfeiting it? As much as you would have paid for the real thing?”
Sylvester laughed, a startled bark. “An ingenious question —for which there is no answer.” But unlike Sparta, Sylvester was a bad liar; she held herself on a tight leash, and what passed for coolness was the result of long practice at restraining a tempestuous nature.
“You left your rented villa on the Isle du Levant the day after you arrived there, took a magneplane from Toulon to Paris, a ramjet to Washington, D.C., where you spent a day in the Library of Congress recording on chip the entire contents of the only remaining Oxford edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom still accessible to the public.
You then flew to London, where with the help of the bookseller Hermione Scrutton—whose record of involvement in literary fraud might almost be considered distinguished in some circles—you arranged to meet certain parties in Oxford, a city where the craft of printing is cherished and its ancient tools preserved, where even the working typefonts of the past are displayed as treasures in museums, where the revered techniques are still occasionally practiced. With the help of several printers and a bookbinder, people whose love of the making of books is so great they allowed themselves to engage in counterfeiting for the sheer joy of practicing their skills—although the very substantial amounts you paid them didn’t dampen their enthusiasm—you made an almost perfect copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was even easier to bribe a notoriously luxury-loving member of Star Queen’s crew to practice his calculating skills on a locked case and steal a book from the cargo of his own ship, replacing it with your counterfeit.”
As Sylvester listened to this recitation the color in her pale cheeks deepened. “That is an extraordinary scenario, Inspector. I can’t imagine what comment you wish me to make.”
“Only confirm it.”
“I am not a pond for you to fish in.” Sylvester willed herself to relax. “Please leave now. I have no more time.”
“I was very careless on my first inspection of Star Queen—I knew that one of your robots had been field tested; I thought that explained its residual radioactivity.
I didn’t bother to examine the fuel assemblies.”
“Get out,” Sylvester said flatly.
“. . . but sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous. If I’d checked the hot robot I would have seen that McNeil had reinserted the fuel rods so that he could open the machine. The oversight almost cost Blake Redfield and me our lives. At your hands.”
“You’re talking utter nonsense. . . .”
In two quick steps Sparta was at the desk. She raised the package wrapped in plastic she’d been holding at her side and slammed it down on the polished stone. “Here’s what’s left of your book, Mrs. Sylvester.”
Sylvester froze. She stared at the package. Her indecision was so transparent, so agonizing, that Sparta could feel the woman’s apprehension and pain.
“A bluff will gain you nothing but a little time,” Sparta said. “I may not have all the details right, but I’ll get at your financial records, I’ll talk to the people who know.
McNeil, for starters. The details and the witnesses will be along shortly. And there’s your book.”
It lay there, a rectangular bundle wrapped in plastic.
“Difficult to recognize in its present condition,” Sparta said harshly, her own fear and resentment for the attack on her life finally spilling into anger, wiping out the empathy that had threatened her judgment, “so perhaps you will be good enough to tell me which of the two copies it is.”
Sylvester sighed. Trembling, she reached to the flimsy plastic, threw it back. . . . The charred block of pages lay in flakes of ash, in the crumbling fragments of its slipcase.
“This is too cruel,” she whispered. Sylvester steadied herself in her chair, grasping the edge of her desk so tightly that her knuckles whitened. “How can I know?”
Sparta pulled the book around and pried open its baked pages. “ ‘The dreamers of the day are dangerous men,’ “
she read, “ ‘for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.’ ‘Dreams’ should be ‘dream,’ singular.”
Sparta turned the wrecked book and, leaning over the desk, pushed it toward Sylvester. “Blake Redfield informs me that the text contains many similar errors. This is the counterfeit. The original has been returned to its owner.”
“To Darlington?”
“That is corr . . .”
In her near exhaustion, in the heady rush of revenge on the woman who’d tried to take her life, Sparta had not been listening . . . Her reaction to the black pistol that appeared in Sylvester’s hand, arcing toward her, was woefully sluggish.
2 8 7 XX Blake Redfield spent a few quick minutes in his Venusview room at the Hesperus Hilton; then, in a white shirt, maroon tie, and dark silk suit of stylish cut, he sallied forth to make a second, more respectable appearance at the Hesperian Museum.
His adventures of the past hour had left him curiously undecided, unsettled. His chance sighting of Linda on that Manhattan street corner had awakened something in him, a feeling not urgent at first, but insistent and increasingly intense.
He’d found it a simple matter to combine his researches into his childhood friend’s mysterious disappearance with his own collector’s passion, for he was nowhere more at home than in old bookstores and library stacks and data files, whether electronic or “fiber-based.” Thus he had stumbled upon the long, deliberately obscured trail of the shadowy international cult he had only recently been able to tie to the prophetae of the Free Spirit. With his nose for inference and testable hypothesis, he’d learned more than he’d expected.