That brought it home.
In the morning, an electronic package containing two sponders arrived from the law firm of Brimbury & Conn, which, according to the routing information, was also located on Rimway. I fed it into the system, dropped into a chair, and put on the headband. The standing image of a woman formed, about a half-meter off the floor, and angled at maybe thirty degrees. The tone wasn’t quite right either. I could have compensated easily enough, but I knew I wasn’t going to like this, so I didn’t bother. The woman was talking to the floor. A library tried to take shape around her. I screened it out.
The woman was attractive, in a bureaucratic, well-pressed sort of way. "Mr. Benedict, please allow us to extend our condolences on the loss of your uncle." Pause. "He was a valued customer here at Brimbury & Conn, and a friend as well. We’ll miss him."
"As will we all," I said.
The image nodded. The woman’s lips trembled, and when she spoke again there was enough uncertainty in her voice to persuade me that, despite the canned speech, there had been some genuine feeling. "We wanted to inform you that you have been named sole heir of his estate. You will need to file the necessary documents as outlined in the appendix to this transmission." She seemed to flounder a little. "We have started procedures to have Gabriel declared officially dead. There will be some delay, of course. The courts are not anxious to move in the case of a missing person, even in this type of situation. However, we will want to be prepared to act on your behalf at the earliest opportunity. Consequently, you should forward the documents to us without delay." She sat down and arranged her skirt. "Your uncle also left in our custody a sealed communication for you, to be delivered in the event of his death. It will be activated at the conclusion of this message by your voice. Say anything. Please do not hesitate to inform us if we can be of further assistance. And, Mr. Benedict—" her voice fell to a whisper, "—I really will miss him."
I stopped it, ran a test, and adjusted the picture. Then I went back to my chair, but I sat a long time before putting the headband back on.
"Gabe."
The lights dimmed, and I was in the old second-floor study back home, seated in a thickly cushioned chair that had once been my favorite. Nothing seemed to have changed: the paneled walls were familiar, and the ancient heavy furniture, and the mahogany-colored drapes. A fire crackled in the grate. And Gabriel stood at my side.
He was barely an arm’s length away, tall, thin, grayer than I remembered, his face partially in shadow. Without a word, he touched my shoulder, pressed down on it. "Hello, Alex."
This was all simulation. But I knew in that moment how much I would miss the old bastard. I had mixed emotions about this. And it surprised me: I’d have expected Gabe to accept his misfortune without subjecting anyone to a maudlin farewell. It was unlike him.
I wanted to break the illusion, to just sit and watch, but you have to respond, or the image reacts to your silence by telling you to speak up, or by reassuring you everything’s okay. I didn’t need that. "Hello, Gabe."
"Since I’m here," he said ruefully, "I guess things must have gone wrong."
"I’m sorry," I said.
He shrugged. "It happens. Timing could hardly have been worse, but you don’t always have control of everything. I assume you have the details. Though possibly not, now that I think of it. Where I’m going, there’s a chance we’ll just disappear and never be heard from again."
Yes, I thought. But not in the way you expect. "Where are you going?"
"Hunting. Into the Veiled Lady." He shook his head; and I could see he was full of regret. "It is a son of a bitch, Alex, the way things turn out sometimes. I hope that, whatever happened, it happened on the way back. I would not want to die before I find out about this."
The plea—for that is what it was—hung there. "You never made it to Saraglia Station," I said.
"Oh." His brow furrowed, and his frame seemed to collapse. He turned away from me, circled a coffee table that had been in the house for years, and eased himself stiffly into a chair opposite mine. "Pity."
He’d slowed down: his movements were more deliberate now, and the quixotic face had sobered. It was difficult to judge whether he was showing the effects of age, or simply responding to the news of his death. In any case, there was a grayness about the conversation, a quivery uncertainty, and a sense of things undone.
"You look good," I said, emptily. It was, under the circumstances, an eerie remark. He seemed not to notice.
"I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk together at least one more time. This is a poor substitute."
"Yes."
"I wish things had been better between us."
There was no easy way to respond to that. He’d been the only parent I’d known, and we had suffered the usual strains. But there had been more: Gabe was an idealist. "You made it very difficult," he continued. What he meant was that I’d made a comfortable living selling rare artifacts to private collectors. An activity he considered immoral.
"I broke no law," I said. Arguing was pointless: nothing I could say would be carried back to the sender. Gabe was beyond this sort of communication now. The illusion was all that remained.
"You’d have broken a few here. No enlightened society allows the sort of thing you do to go unregulated." He took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly. "Let it go. I paid a higher price for my principles than I would have wished, Alex. It’s been a long time."
The figure before me was nothing more than software, knew only what my uncle had known at the moment of storage. It had no grasp of the principles of which it spoke, no real sense of the regret that I felt. But it allowed him to do something that I would have liked very much to have done: "I’m sorry," he said. "If I had it to do over, I would have let it go."
"But you would still have disapproved."
"Of course."
"Good."
He smiled, and repeated my comment with satisfaction. "There’s hope for you yet, Alex." He pushed himself to his feet, opened a liquor cabinet, and extracted a bottle and two glasses. "Mindinmist," he said. "Your favorite."
It was good to be home.
I violated a personal rule with that sponder: I gave in to the images and allowed myself to accept the illusion as real. And I realized how much I’d missed the paneled, book-lined study at the back of the house. It had always been one of my two favorite rooms. (The other was in the attic, a magic place from which I’d watched the forest many times for the approach of dragons or enemy soldiers.) It smelled of pine and fresh cloth drapes and casselate book covers and scorched wood. It was filled with exotic photos: an abandoned vine-strangled temple guarded by an obscene idol that seemed to be mostly belly and teeth, a broken column in an otherwise empty desert, a small group gathered before a step pyramid under a pair of moons. A reproduction of Marcross’s portrait of the immortal warship Corsarius hung on one wall, with plyseal sketches of men and women with whom Gabe had worked. (Plyseal had been one of his hobbies. There was one of me, at about four years old, in my old bedroom.)
And there were always artifacts: toys, computers, lamps, statuary that Gabe had recovered from various field sites. Even now, I could see a cylindrical, studded object in a glass display.
I raised my drink to him. He lifted his own, and our eyes locked briefly. I could almost believe that Gabe and I were making it right, at long last. The liquor was warm, very smooth, and it tasted of other days.
"There’s something you’ll have to do," he said.