They were incomplete, as though he were trying out ideas. The expressions were inevitably wistful, melancholy, mournful. No life of the party here. The hairstyles were different, the hair itself sometimes cut short, sometimes shoulder length, inevitably in the fashions of the 570s. But it struck her, as she passed along the wall, examining the figures in the glow of the lamp, that each was an aspect of Emily.
Or herself.
Kim’s scalp prickled.
She drew the imager out of her utility pouch and began taking pictures. She tried to record everything.
She had come hoping to find the original Hunter logs. The possibility suddenly seemed remote, but the table had a drawer, so she opened it. It contained only a couple of rags.
There was a door at the far end of the room, leading to an enclosed porch, beyond which lay a washroom. She went through the door, and saw plastic containers and flowerpots on the porch floor. She found a medicine cabinet in the washroom and opened it. One of the containers still had air trapped inside. The container floated out and rose to the ceiling.
She went back the way she’d come, through the formal living room and on into the far wing.
She opened drawers, broke into cabinets when hinges wouldn’t work. She searched everywhere, and then went upstairs and prowled through bedrooms and washrooms. A broken pot or two remained in the kitchen cabinets. She was shocked to find several of Kane’s trophies in the mud, including the Conciliar Medal of Valor, the highest award the Republic had to give. It seemed odd that no one had been here before her and claimed the treasure.
Tora should have it. She wiped it off and put it in her pouch.
She felt movement in the water.
And sensed that she was not alone.
She listened, heard nothing, and surveyed the room for another way out. She’d have no choice but to go through the window if she had to, risking the glass shards still jutting out from the frame. She turned abruptly, as if to catch someone watching her. But the room was empty save for shadows drifting around the walls.
Dumb.
It was not at all hard to imagine that the spirit of Markis Kane lingered about the place. Had she been in sunlight, she’d have smiled at the notion and dismissed it with contempt. But down here—There must be a part of us, she thought, that’s wired to accept the paranormal. Science and the experience of a lifetime don’t count for much when the lights go out.
She returned to the hallway, swept it with her lamp, and started toward the rear of the house, stopping to examine a cabinet and a small desk. She’d acquired an escort of fish, long, rainbow-colored creatures that moved with her but darted back whenever she turned toward them. She was pleased to have their company.
Another bedroom opened off left. Here the furniture was still more or less in place. Clothing, or possibly bedding—it was impossible to know—lay in gray piles on the floor.
She continued down the corridor to the last doorway, which was on the right hand side of the corridor.
The sanctum sanctorum.
Its door was closed.
She pushed on it, gently at first, and then with as much force as she could muster. It did not budge. She took out the laser and cut a hole big enough to pass through.
Within, she saw a desk, a credenza, some cabinets and tables. And a chair.
She passed inside.
There was a closet across the room. Drapes covered the wall on her right. Two of the other walls had large windows. This window, she thought, looked north toward Eagle Point. The one on her left opened onto Mount Hope. She visualized Kane seated in here, watching the sun drop behind that scarred peak. What had he been thinking?
She rifled everything, breaking into cabinets, opening drawers, trying not to spill their contents, as if that mattered, searching the closet, which contained more clothes and several unopened packages of sketch paper. When she’d finished she drifted back into the center of the room, allowing her lamp to point where it would.
The beam touched the drapes. Still in place after all these years.
They covered an interior wall.
She thought of the sketches of Emily in the west wing, and the murals Kane had done for local libraries. Her converter came on, startling her. It murmured gently as it went about its business of renewing her air supply.
What was behind the drapes?
She raised her lamp. There must have been something jerky in the movement because the fish accompanying her vanished. Kim floated in the center of the room, fighting the natural buoyancy that kept lifting her toward the ceiling. She approached the curtains, touched them, tried to grasp them, to draw them back. But they dissolved in her hands. She tried again and brought another section away.
There was a sketch on the wall.
A ringed world.
She pulled the rest of the drapes down.
It was hard to make out in the uncertain light. But the planet was part of a mural embodying a woman. Another Emily. No question: her own image, brave and resigned, smiled out at her. She looked as she had on the Hunter, wearing the blue jacket open at the throat, her hair shoulder length, her eyes pensive. The ringed world was in her left hand.
And there was something in her right.
Kim went closer with the lamp, trying to make it out.
It looked like a turtle-shell.
She stared at it while the chill from the water crept into her bones. A flared teardrop on an elliptical platform.
The toy warship.
The turtle-shell vessel from Ben Tripley’s office.
It was the Valiant!
There was more: Although most of the sketch had faded during its long immersion, the background had been filled with star fields and—what? Roiling clouds? Impossible to be sure. But there, in one corner was the unmistakable image of NGC2024. The Horsehead Nebula.
Horsehead and ringed world and turtle-shell and Emily. All she could think of was Turtles all the way down.
The water seemed to have gotten colder and the suit’s automatic heating function wasn’t keeping up. She adjusted the control a couple of degrees, and then started taking pictures.
The most logical explanation was that the Valiant had been a real ship, and that Kane had once served on it. But it seemed unlikely that Ben Tripley would not be aware of that piece of information, would not in fact be conversant with every known make of starship. That was, after all, his business.
She moved in close and peered at the vessel.
No propulsion tubes. Just like the model.
What kind of ship didn’t have propulsion tubes?
She caught her breath: Was the bookshelf model a reproduction of a vessel from another civilization? A celestial? The Horsehead was in Orion, and would have been visible along the projected course of the Hunter. If there had in fact been contact, Kane and Kile Tripley might each have recorded it in his own way, one in a painting, the other by using a tech shop to build a reproduction. Her earlier guess that Ben Tripley’s model starship was a replica of a vessel from another place suddenly looked quite prescient.
Something caught her eye, a movement, a flicker, outside the range of her lamp. Over near the hole she’d cut in the door. A fish momentarily passing through the light?
She put the imager away, wondering if it would be worthwhile to arrange for a team to come in and recover the wall, to bring it out into the sun. The villa had been abandoned, so surely she could do that without legal consequences.
The thought drained away as she became aware that light was coming from the passageway. It was dim, barely perceptible, but it was there.
She shut off her lamp and backed into a corner. Marine life. It had to be: a luminous eel of some sort, probably. Nevertheless, she edged toward one of the windows. The frames were jammed with broken glass.
She did a final survey of the room, refusing to be rattled, and was rewarded with the sight of a mug all but buried in the silt. When she picked it up and wiped it off, she saw that it was emblazoned with the designator and seal of the 376. She added it to the Medal of Valor.