"Not a one. Not a one. And none of them fit for your pretty ears, either. No, Albin, stay. I think my guest would feel more comfortable with a chaperon, though God alone knows how I'd run her down if the fancy hit me."
"As you wish, sir."
Moira smiled gratefully, including both men.
"Well, then," said Blake, "pretty as you are, and much as I'd like to chat and look and wishful think, it's business that made me ask you here, so to business we must. How do you feel about the man who killed Frog?"
She did not have to answer. Her feelings burned on her face.
"That strongly? Albin, rummage through that stuff on the table there and hand Miss Eight the solidos we were talking about last night." Blake's office was a vast clutter. He seemed to be a man without time to keep order.
"Plainfield," she said, handling two cubes about ten centimeters to a side. There were little differences in appearances, but she felt no doubt.
"Those came in yesterday, from Twilight Town. I've got a man up there who watches out for things. Made these of a fellow who's been hanging around their brass. Thought he recognized him from back when. He was one of the ones we exiled when Frog was killed. He was lucky. Got picked up by one of their crawlers. But he wants to come home. Has family here. He's trying to earn his way back in."
"What about Plainfield?" Her voice was hard, her throat tight. Her stomach felt as though she were about to throw up.
"He's using the name Diebold Amelung now, but that's not his real one either."
"What're you going to do?"
"For now, nothing." He raised a hand to silence her protest. "For now. In time, what needs doing. I could have him killed, but then I wouldn't find out what he's up to. I wouldn't find out why he killed Frog. I wouldn't find out if he's connected with some strange phenomena we've observed Brightside. Albin, is that projector ready? Good. Moira, the man's real name is Michael Dee. We've known that for some time."
"And you haven't done anything?" She began to get mad.
"My dear young lady, Blake has done everything possible, consistent with its own interests. Which isn't much, I'll grant. This man, whatever name he uses, is no Old Earth shooter, no crackdome cutthroat. He could buy and sell Edgeward City. He's a very old, rich, and powerful man. He's got a lot of connections."
"So?"
"For you it's simple. You could burn him. You've got nothing to lose. I've got an industrial empire and a hundred thousand people to consider."
"He can't be that important."
"No? He owns a planet. He almost controls the private instel trade. He has interests in all the shipping lines that carry our exports. His brother is Gneaus Julius Storm, the mercenary, who has a personal army of twenty thousand men and the ships to move it. He's associated with Richard Hawksblood, another mercenary. And he has friends in Luna Command who would put Blackworld under embargo simply on his say-so."
"I see. If he's such a big man, how come he's in Twilight?"
"Exactly. Now we're in tune, little lady. Let's watch some clips. Albin."
Korando lowered the lighting and started the holo projector.
"This is the shade cloud we send up from the outstation to cover the run from the Whitlandsund to the Shadowline," Blake said. The holo cube portrayed a tower of darkness, which, she realized after a moment, was dark only due to a lessening of an almost unbearable glare. "We've filtered it down to the limits of resolution."
The hologram changed. Another pillar of dust appeared, viewed from a slightly sunward angle, making a portion look like a tower of fiery motes. "A charter running fourteen hours north of the Shadowline caught this two years ago. We couldn't make anything of it then. Too far to investigate, and in Twilight territory. Somebody thought it might be dust blowing out of a volcano."
The third clip was a still of crawler tracks under artificial lighting. "This one's only about a month old. It was taken a little over two thousand kilometers out the Shadowline by another charter. He thought he'd stumbled across some side trip of Frog's. They didn't look right. Too wide. We checked against Frog's log. He didn't make them.
"Something was wrong. Obviously. It bothered me. Curiosities always do. I had Albin check the records. I had him talk to drivers. And he found out what I thought he'd find out. The only Edgeward man who ever went that far was Frog. So I had Albin make the rounds again. He found several charters who had gotten readings on, or sightings of, dust pillars in the north, especially way out west, where they could be seen from the Shadowline itself. Albin."
The holo changed to a small-scale chart of the northern hemisphere west of the Edge of the World. "Nobody thought they were worth reporting. Just another Brightside curiosity. Once we got interested, we plotted them. They all seem to have appeared along the black line there."
Moira understood. "A shade route to the Shadowline from Twilight territory. That would be expensive."
"She's quick, Albin. And the crawler track confirms it. It was made by a Meacham long-range charter. Twilight is in the Shadowline, at considerable expense in money and man-hours. More than they'd have available for a speculative venture. Putting a line of shadow generators across two thousand kilometers of Brightside is an awesome feat. The cost in equipment and lives must have been phenomenal. I checked with the engineers. They said it could be done, but somebody would have to be crazy to try it. So why did somebody?"
Korando changed clips twice while Blake was talking. The first showed an artist's concept of a peculiar tractor, the second an action sequence of the real thing, slightly different in its lines. The camera angle left no doubt that it had been shot in the Shadowline. Fine lines of intense light ran along the lip of towering cliffs in the background. "This was shot earlier in the week, not far from where we found the mysterious crawler track," Blake explained.
"This doesn't make sense," Moira told him. "There's no profit in it."
"Are you sure? There's got to be. Huge profits. Those Meachams are worse pirates than old Obadiah ever was. I was hoping you could shed some light."
"Me? All I know about the Shadowline is what Frog told me."
"Exactly. The only man who ever went all the way to the end."
"You mean he found something?"
"That's what I want to know. Did he?"
"He never said anything. But I only got to see him for a minute before he shooed me out. And then... Then... "
"Yes." Blake swept a hand around to include most of the room. "I've gone over every record we've got, trying to find something. Even those dreadful hours of broadcasts that went out before he made it back. I haven't found a thing. In fact, I've found too much nothing. It's like making a fly-by of a black hole. You know there's something there, but all you can tell is that it isn't. If you see what I mean. A lot of records were tampered with. You can't tell what Plainfield wanted to cover up. And more records seem to have been ‘rectified' since. Like that black hole, there's so much nothing that you can tell it's something big and dangerous. And my only recourse is to some very fallible human memories of something that happened a long time ago."
"What about your spy?"
"I'd have to bring him home to question him properly. I'm trying, but I don't think I'll make it. The past few years the Meachams have gotten more paranoid than usual. Like maybe they've got something to hide. Getting the solidos of Dee was damned near impossible."
"You could put someone in, sir," Korando suggested. "Someone with a legitimate reason to come and go. Do the interview there."
"Easier than bringing someone out, I agree. But I'm afraid of how much trouble I might have getting my someone back out, legitimate business or not. My man there gives the impression that outsiders are watched pretty damned close."