She shook her head. Arthur could probably give her answers to those questions, but she hated to wake him up. Let this one slide for now and on to the next entry.
CLEVER BASTARDS! Claire sat up straighter. Had Maud figured out the answer to the previous poser? And if so, why the note of admiration? If letting yourself get eaten was clever, then pastrami and Popsicles had more on the ball than people.
The last entry waited for her. JACK.
She leaned back in her chair and slurped some more coffee, letting associations flow.
Sprat. O’-lantern. Be nimble. Up the price, the front bumper. London, Kennedy, the Ripper. Jack Hire, that opera catawauller Arthur liked so much. Jack Toricelli, the gas giant specialist? No, he hated Maud’s gargantuan guts just like every other sane person who dealt with her. The woman had no friends, and her family had disowned her years before. What—or more likely who—the hell had that miserable Pyg been talking about?
Time to cheat a little bit. She put her mug aside, slipped her hand into her robe and closed her fingers around her locket. Since she was alone she didn’t have to subvocalize.
“Access.” she said quietly. “Jack.”
Parameters? the Whugg computer whispered inside her head.
“Be like that.” She rubbed her chin. “Try… try Pygs named Jack known to Professor Maud Whalsitz.”
The reply was immediate. ‘Monterey’ Jack Porklowski of Encino, California, USA, Earth.
“Give me a thumbnail bio.”
Caucasian male, aged fifty-two, single. Multimillionaire art dealer and owner of the Handy Hocks chain of pawnshops. Currently under investigation by several agencies for tax evasion and alleged dealings in items either known to be stolen or, at best, of questionable provenance.
Now she was getting somewhere. “What sort of items?”
Works of art. Antiquities. Alien artifacts.
“Friends with a fence. How interesting. Has Maud had illicit dealings with this man in the past?”
No direct evidence.
Claire was undeterred by this response. One thing Whugg computers had in common with their retarded silicon brethren was their annoying habit of never answering questions you didn’t ask. She considered her next query carefully before speaking.
“OK, correlate probability based on contested alien artifacts traced to Jack and believed to have originated in systems where Maud has been on Expedition.”
Probability approaches certainty.
There was a slight pause, then a new voice spoke inside her head. It was as deep and richly musical as the lowest notes from a pipe organ, and it shimmered with a vast oceanic amusement. Excellent question, little one!
Claire grinned happily. “Thanks, big guy! How are you doing, Boss?”
Intoxicatingly pleasured. I am aquiver. This situation is most deliciously intriguing. Its resolution shall indeed be a root-swelling feast of revelation.
“Intriguing to just you, or all of you?”
Shifting attentions and competing megamultiplex inputs to our linked solitaryseparateselfsame. We/I am busy busy busy sensing/thinking/learn-ing/sharing/wondering/marveling/in-tegrating/understanding what we ponder and pondering what we don’t understand and ever still wondering what might come; the growing circle of knowing casting wider horizons of unknowing. I/we percolate with tickled curiosity.
“Dumb question, huh?”
The Whugg laughed, its mirth tremendous and splendid, like having god bust a gut over a real knee-slap-per. No such thing, child, it chuckled fondly, then was gone.
Claire drew out her pendant and kissed it.
“Damn! But I love my job,” she whispered before putting the locket away and going back on the clock.
“Replay.”
On the screen before her Maud once again toppled inside the leviathan’s gaping maw like an orange-frosted lard-enhanced bonbon.
“Hold.” The image froze with the professor’s loafered feet protruding like a forked Florsheim tongue.
“Roll back.” The creature regurgitated its Pyg meatpie neat as a cat hacking up a hairball and backed away.
“Hold.” She scratched her chin thoughtfully. “Pan image 90 degrees clockwise.” Although she was viewing it on a flat screen, the recording was holographic. The viewpoint swuftg smoothly around to a point about ten meters behind Whalsitz. “Zoom to distance halved.” The big woman’s bulbous form expanded like an inflating weather balloon.
The new vantage point and close-up revealed that a flaccid army surplus knapsack was slung over one meaty shoulder and a sheath knife was clipped to her belt.
“Proceed in slo-mo, quarter speed.” Claire once more watched the leviathan bear down like a rubberlipped surrealist bus. This time she saw how at the last moment Maud had gone for her knife. She’d gotten it out, but it had tumbled from her fingers a fraction of a second before the leviathan got her. Not that Claire could see where it would have been much help.
So the question had been modified to: Why had Maud carried a knife and empty bag while letting herself get eaten?
Dammit, the answer had to be there somewhere. Had to be! Just as she was about to run the loop one more time before going on to review later recordings, a discreet signal sounded from the area monitor. She changed over to real-time display to check it out.
There was a leviathan approaching the clearing. She settled back to watch and see if another indigene came out to play midnight snack. Maybe it was a lemming thing…
Several minutes later she was shaking her head in wonder and muttering, “You clever, clever bastards!” over and over as she began hunting further clues on the recordings.
Now that she knew what to tell the system to look for, it didn’t take her long to find what she sought.
Arthur shuffled out of their bedroom in his underwear, yawning and rubbing his eyes. “Claire?” he called, “How long have you been up?”
No answer came.
Muzzily concluding that her wifely ESP had as usual sent her to take over the bathroom just before he needed it, he mooched on into the kitchen to get some caffeinated brain-starter in him while he waited for his turn to use the plumbing. She always did this to him, her preemptive precognition also extending to magazines and newspapers, the phone, the vid remote, and the last beer in the fridge. These morning waits were the worst. There were times he thought his marriage vows should have been To have and to hold your water.
By the time he’d sucked down one cup of coffee she still hadn’t come out. Muttering dire threats in which the words mascara and maiming figured prominently under his breath, he went to hammer on the bathroom door.
“Claire? Hurry it up, will you?” he called, giving the door a smart rap. “Do your makeup—”
It swung open under his hand.
A tendril of unease curled through his innards when he saw that she wasn’t inside. After jittering anxiously from foot to foot while attending to urgent matters, he went looking for her in every one of the ship’s rooms.
“Don’t do this to me, Claire,” he begged, going to the pilot’s station by the bay window and signaling Maud’s ship to see if she had gone over there. The craft reported itself to be unoccupied.
He headed for the science station at close to a dead run. There he found a note posted on one of the screens. It read Seed you later, husbandator!
“No,” he moaned, shaking his head from side to side in denial. “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t.”
Fearing the worst, he instructed the system to backtrack through the most recent recordings made of the area outside to prove to himself she couldn’t possibly have done anything as crazy as what he suspected.