For all his memory problems, he had recognized her voice. From their brief direct interface worlds away, when he was trapped in the blackbox, sensory-deprived, helpless. Somehow, that had stuck in his mind. This won't take a minute.
She spoke to the limo:
"Information."
The annoying wait of an Out-world comm system.
"Connected."
"Give me the address of Prometheus Body Works."
"Not listed."
"Try a global search, all parameters maxed out."
Another few interminable seconds.
"Prometheus Body Works was destroyed local date 01/01/00, the Blast Event. No current address."
"Fuck," she said.
"Language," said the limo. The voice hadn't changed, but the barest clues of timing and tone gave it away.
"Masters."
"Mira." The gods, or more likely their second-rate, nonperson avatar, waited in crackling silence.
"Torvalli's mindwipe was a fiasco," Mira complained. "Who said he was an expert? I hope you didn't send flowers. The wipe fucked Vale's memory permanently. I thought it was supposed to be safe."
"It has been tested many times. All other subjects recovered the ablility to long-term memorize in a few days."
Definitely an avatar. Wooden and pedantic.
"Not this guy. But I think I know why."
It waited dumbly. She continued:
"His memory was already compromised. Not all of it, just everything after and including November 2, 54, HC Standard. That's when he was copied."
"Conjecture?"
"Yes, conjecture. Do his medical records show any memory problems between November 2 and the Blast?"
"None was recorded."
She paused to reflect. The dull-witted avatar waited patiently.
"So here's how I see it: He went in expecting a routine—for him—upgrade. They got him on the table and copied him. Impossible, unthinkable, but they did it. Whatever technique they used didn't screw anything up in itself, but somehow they heisen-berged his AI core just a little. Torvalli's mindwipe, along with a month in a blackbox, sent him over the edge."
"Should you eliminate him?"
She thought of the sad little entity trying to joke his way through a reality that no longer connected, no longer cohered, no longer accrued from one day to the next. Vale was harmless, but perhaps it would be kinder to erase him as she had his duplicate.
And, of course, there'd been that one flare of memory, strange and unexplainable. A memory from his hours as a blackbox. The slightest of risks.
"No. He's a vegetable. And he might be useful later."
As she said the words, the real reason for her merciful impulse struck her with an unfamiliar wrenching of her stomach. Mira felt a kinship with Vale, with his timeless, pointless existence. Mira had lost her past, but so much worse to have lost a future, and all the words that went with it: promise, desire, tomorrow. She hoped that the gods would take her suggestion and leave the man alone.
"I will pursue the matter of Prometheus Body Works," the avatar said.
"You do that." It was one thing sub-Turings were good for. Leg-work. And with its god-given cache the avatar could penetrate security, privacy, and legal barriers as if they were steam.
The crackle turned to silence: a demigod departed.
The blast zone was still visible behind her. Damn, it was huge. Thiry kilometers across. The pollution-haze of Malvir City muddied sundown through the front windows. But then Mira realized that the haze wasn't smog. Malvir was well past internal combustion energy. The veil was a permanent avian penumbra, flocks and swarms of birds, insects, flying mammals. It overhung the city like a shroud.
The limo slowed down when they reached the outer limits, dusty suburban sprawl replacing the green circles of radial irrigation. The car apparently didn't want to hit a bird at 500 kph. It lost altitude and began to sound the noise it had made at takeoff, audible even through its soundproofing: a piercing aquiline screech, a predatory warning to stay out of the way.
The little yellow-suited man had brought an associate.
He wasn't the wily old art dealer's usual taste in company. A bald, ugly creature, his pale skin tinged with red in the fading light of sunset. He remained silent when Zimivic introduced him, rather vaguely—as if making the name up on the spot—as Mr. Thompson Brandy. Darling was tempted to look over his shoulder at the bar, following Zimivic's line of sight to see if he'd simply read the name from a bottle.
It hardly mattered. The man was clearly not here for Zimivic's pleasure. That only left one role: a moneyman. You didn't bring money unless you were ready to spend, and that implied that more was at stake than a forged sculpture.
"Surely we're here for the same reason," Darling said.
"Absolutely," replied Zimivic, but offered no more.
It was pointless being cagey. "Don't you have enough Vaddums, you old bastard?" Darling said. He smiled as he said the word, and lengthened its first syllable with a touch of Mira's accent.
"Never enough," said Zimivic. "Didn't you see the beauty of this one? It's his greatest work."
Darling had said the same thing to himself, but never to Leoa. If the piece turned out to be a forgery, the error would be too embarrassing.
"The central stem is marvelous, it simply writhes with energy." Zimivic sculpted the air with his hands as he spoke. "The ancillary arms are unbelievably delicate. I scaled them from the photos: point fifteen millimeters. Did you realize that?"
Darling let his attention wander slightly. The old man's focus on technique, his dismissal of the fiery pain that Vaddum's sculptures embodied, had always disgusted Darling.
"And the use of the heat-sink manifold is pure genius," Zimivic continued. "The arms' attachment can be far more plastic that way; they can be fitted anywhere along the stem. Much more liberated than his known arboreal pieces."
In the window beyond the yellow-suited old man and his red-tinged accomplice, a flock of birds was wheeling slowly around the opposite tower. For some reason, the birds were bright white on the near side of the tower, but faded into the dark night on the other. Some trick of the sunset? A feature of the hotel's outside lighting? Darling assigned a tertiary processor to consider the problem as Zimivic droned on.
"But my favorite part is the copper spindles near the top. So ancient. So frail and poignant. Not entirely stabilized, either. I simulated it: They'll oxidize, my friend! Turn green in a few decades. How deliciously tragic!"
All of Darling's processors came to attention suddenly. Copper spindles? There were none on the piece he'd seen. Suddenly, it was obvious: he and Zimivic were here to buy different sculptures.
There were two new Vaddums.
The sculptor must be alive.
The whole picture came into in his head. Whoever was dealing the sculptures had contacted several galleries, all separately and in extreme secrecy. Each customer had been offered a different Vaddum, and each would be paying for a unique, unrepeatable media event. A fabulous confidence game, which would crumble after trumpeting news releases revealed that everyone had bought not a final, posthumous, «undiscovered» Vaddum, but merely a new work by a still living artist.
Clearly, Darling's job here was finished. The price of Vaddums was about to tumble. Leoa and her conservative backers wouldn't touch this fiasco with a ten-foot pole.
But Darling was elated. He hadn't come here for nothing.
Vaddum was alive. There was a chance to see the old master again, risen from the grave.
He looked across the table at the babbling Zimivic. What an idiot, revealing everything without waiting for Darling to say a word. Darling smiled to himself. He would bid up the piece, offering to broker it for 20 % or even less, forcing Zimivic to do the same and adding the last measure of insult to injury.