The boat rose and fell.
She saw a house, but it was not Kane's, not the right shape. Her pictures indicated it was probably his neighbor on the south, a physician who'd performed well during the disaster.
She continued straight on until she saw what she was looking for: an arched pavilion, a stone wall, a Thunderbird house.
That was it. It had angled wings and courtyards and a long central spine. The roof, with its crests and ridgelines, was unmistakable.
Kim dropped her makeshift anchor over the side and watched the line play out to fourteen meters. Deep.
She secured it to the gunwale, pulled on her gear, and slipped into the water. She immediately felt safer, as though she were no longer exposed.
She turned toward the bottom and rode down on her jets.
Gray light filtered through the surface. The water grew cool and then warm again as she passed through alternating currents. An eel glided past. She switched on her lamp and a few fish quickly retreated. The boat was a dark shape above.
She leveled off in front of the second floor, eye-to-eye with an oculus window. The interior was thick with silt. But she could see a bed, a dresser, a couple of chairs. A fish glided out of a venting pipe, turned toward the lamp, and then disappeared out of the room.
She descended to the front door. It had no power, no knob, no easy way to open it. She passed by, moved along the front of the building, found a gaping window, and swam in.
Her lamp picked out a couch, a fireplace, and a flatscreen in the down position on one wall. This, she thought, had been the formal living room Gould had described.
Amazing. Kane had apparently not bothered to move his furniture when he left, had simply given in to the rising water.
She passed into the central hallway. A staircase rose on one side, assorted chairs and tables were tumbled about, and a couple of beams lay in the debris.
Kim pushed across to the opposite wing. She had to struggle to get the door open. Inside, she looked into what seemed to be Kane's work area. A wooden table was turned over, its legs sticking up like those of a dead animal. Several rolls of what might once have been canvasses were scattered in the silt. Artists'
brushes lay everywhere, and pieces of an easel.
She could make out sketches, or parts of sketches, on the walls. Women's faces, mostly. Framed by trees, lanterns, a vestibule. But always the woman was prominent.
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.
The illumination grew brighter. A soft green glow, like phosphorous.
She pushed off the wall and drifted easily across the room, getting an angle so she could look out into the passageway without getting too close.
A pair of eyes stared back. Great, green, unblinking eyes. They locked on her.
Intelligent.
Mad.
She could see no head, only the eyes, floating almost independent of one another just outside in the corridor. They were big. Enormous. Too large to belong to any creature that could have reasonably fit into the hallway.
Her heart exploded and she almost lost her breather. She dived back away from the door, crossed the room, turned on her jets, and crashed through the broken frame, taking wood and glass with her.
She made for the surface, thinking, there had been nothing attached to the eyes, no body, no corporeal presence of any kind.
It was dark when she broke the surface. Kim looked around, located her boat, and raced to it, half expecting to be seized from below and dragged beneath the water. She hauled herself quickly over the gunwale, cut loose the anchor, tore off her breather, and started the engine.
The boat moved away with maddening deliberation.
She didn't know where the flyer was. The sky was full of stars but the shore was featureless. She forced herself to slow down. She checked her compass and brought the boat around to a southeastern heading.
Behind her, something snorted. But nothing showed itself.
When she got close to land she had to cruise the shoreline, past forest broken up by buildings and strips of beach.
Occasionally she saw flickers of light in the trees, moving in conjunction with her as though she was being tracked.
Then her lamp picked out the welcome shape of the flyer. She turned the boat quickly inshore, ran it onto the beach, abandoned it, and made a dash for the aircraft. Once inside, she directed the vehicle to take off.
"Where?" it asked.
"Anywhere," she said. "Up."
15
I got no way to go to Draco.
-GEORGE THOMAS & LIVIA HOWE,.
The Arcturian Follies, Act II, 600 "You should never have done that," said Solly. He was furious. "Not alone. You know better."
"Yeah," she said. "Now I do." And: "Never again."
A long silence this time. Then: "Kim, it has to have been an eel or something."
She was still in Eagle Point, in her robe, on the sofa with her legs tucked under her. A virtual Solly sat in a virtual chair in the projection area. Behind him, she could see a window and a view of the ocean. He was at home.
"It wasn't an eel," she insisted. "And it wasn't in my head." And to her everlasting embarrassment, tears ran down her cheeks. "It was really there, Solly. So help me, it was really there."