Rue called up a photograph on her tablet. “Show me.”
He pointed out the portion of the embroidery that gave her name. “And this part says, ‘Cherished daughter.’ Maybe she was the daughter of the artist.”
“What about the wave design on the border?” It had played an important role in Rue’s interpretation of the work’s symbolism.
“Oh, that’s not a wave,” Traversed said. “It’s a thought. She is thinking, you see.”
If what he said was true, a great many art historians would look very foolish, starting with Rue herself. The best way to handle this would be to get ahead of it, to be the one to publish the new information. But that would be an admission that she accepted his claims of cultural authority. A clever attorney could use that against the museum.
“So your people have no tradition, no story, about Even Glancing?”
He shook his head. It was an important concession. She felt a little compromised to have wheedled it from him. “Then why do you want it back?”
“Because,” he said seriously, “there is a ghost imprisoned in it.”
Good luck arguing that in court, she thought. But all she said was, “That’s it?”
“That’s enough. We need to free the ghost.”
“And how would you do that?”
“We have to destroy the picture.”
Rue’s horror must have shown on her face, because he said, “It is the only humane way.”
It was unthinkable. “Traversed, this artwork is acknowledged as a masterpiece—not just on this world, but all over the Twenty Planets. It’s in all the art history books, and people honor the Atoka for having created it. Doesn’t that make you proud? Don’t you want to preserve the greatest achievement of your ancestors?”
He didn’t have an immediate response, but seemed to be weighing what she said. She watched, hoping he would reconsider. But at last he shook his head. “It’s not worth her suffering. Pride can’t justify that.”
He really believed it. Rue had been taught from childhood to respect the beliefs of other cultures—but damn it, she had her own core principles. “Then I am bound to oppose you,” she said. “I cannot see this artwork destroyed.”
They sat in silence, facing one another, aware that they had become enemies.
“You had better go now,” Rue said.
“All right.” His expression was regretful. At the door he stopped, looked back. “I’m sorry.”
“I understand,” Rue said.
But she didn’t.
The gallery was relatively uncrowded except for the clump of people around the Aldry portrait. There were masterworks all over the walls, but people had eyes only for Aldry. They wanted to say they had seen her. They wanted their photographs taken with her. Some just stood there for minutes at a time, watching the image change, transported.
They all knew the story.
Once upon a time, Aldry was a real girl living in an Atoka village that had tamed all the birds in the forest around them. Birds were their messengers and their music; birds ate the troublesome insects and brought warnings about the weather. They made nests in the thatched roofs of the village, and kept everyone below dry. Artisans vied to create elaborate cages for them.
Then one day the Atoka spied an ominous fireball descending from the heavens: the landing craft of the settlers who were the ancestors of present-day Saronans. That the two peoples were very different was clear from the start, for the Atoka had amber eyes like owls, and where normal humans had body hair, the Atoka had downy feathers. The new settlers were refugees pushed out of a crowded, urbanized planet. They were woefully unprepared for a subsistence life scratched from alien ground. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of Aldry’s people, they would have perished. The natives taught them which crops could be cultivated and which were poison, how to hunt the abundant wild animals, how to speak to unfamiliar nature. But as the settlers multiplied, and more of them arrived, relations grew tense. Conflict seemed inevitable. It had happened that way throughout human history.
But Aldry prevented history from going down its familiar, violent path. She had fallen in love with a bookish young settler—the very one who chronicled the whole tale in cramped and sideways antique language. In her culture, a woman’s decision to marry conferred personhood on the man she chose, and when she announced her intention to unite the two groups, the Atoka could no longer regard the settlers as invaders of questionable humanity. The marriage ushered in a period of peace. Aldry bore twin boys. One of them favored his father’s people and one his mother’s, for one had hair and the other had down.
It came to pass that a terrible flood swept through the settlers’ town, destroying the homes and fields they had labored for years to build. Viewing the drenched mudlands where their crops and storehouses had been, they knew they faced starvation. Then Aldry saw her duty. Sorrowfully, she kissed her infant boys goodbye and set out alone into the forest. Five days later, an immense flock of birds came to the village. Led by a silver pheasant, the birds descended onto the fields, each with a seed in its beak, and replanted all the crops. The village was saved, but no one ever saw Aldry again. It was said that a silver pheasant perched on the ridgepole of the house where her grieving husband raised her orphan boys, as if to keep them company.
When the boys became men, they quarreled. One went to live with the Atoka, the other stayed with the settlers. They both became great leaders, and their sibling enmity passed to their people. When war broke out, they faced each other in battle. But just when the Atoka brother was about to kill his twin, he glimpsed the silver pheasant in the sky above, and spared him for Aldry’s sake.
“She is the mother of us all,” Saronans said. She was the generous spirit of the planet that welcomed them and invited them to be at home.
The portrait dated to an era at least two hundred years after the original events. It was thought to be an Atoka artist’s image of Aldry, with wings foreshadowing her sacrifice. Who else could it show?
Unless it was Even Glancing, the daughter of the artist.
Rue shook her head impatiently. In an important way, it did not matter. Whoever she had been once, she was Aldry now. Generations of Saronans had woven that identity around her. And they would not easily give it up.
Rue half expected never to hear of Traversed Bridge again. The odds against any lone individual mounting a credible repatriation claim were so high that, when he realized it,he would most likely become discouraged and leave for home.
She underestimated his determination.
Three weeks later, as she was picking up breakfast on her way to work, her wristband started to chime insistently with news alerts having to do with the museum. She put in her earpiece and listened on the tram, her attention so absorbed that her body had to take over the automatic job of exiting at her stop and walking to the staff entrance.
The story was sensational and appealing: a remnant of the Atoka had been discovered on faraway Eleuthera. Old Radovani records filled in their history. Now, an Atoka emissary had come seeking the ancient homeland of his people. After traveling across the light years, the young man had met only rejection and disbelief from the Orofino Museum.