The sculpture was made of beautifully spun glass and showed an ancient slipship drifting through the clouds, the finsakes of Wireburn rising up from the helium seas below to greet it. As a work of art it was impressive. The spun threads that made up the clouds and wires connecting the ship to the rigid gasbag that kept it aloft were almost too fine to see with the naked eye. The ship's name, Shellar, was carefully written on the side in blue glass. The flags on top almost seemed to wave in the wind, even though a strong push was more likely to break them right off the sculpture. Against the backdrop of the high, vaulted ceiling of the museum's statuary gallery it made a pretty picture.
As a historical record it was terrible. The Shellar was one of the first slipships to eschew a traditional sailship hull for a more aerodynamic one, a necessity for the skies of windy planets like Wireburn. The artist had also chosen to remove all the weapons ports and defensive netting. Whether that was because they were hard to sculpt or just because so many artists seemed to take offense at such tools of violence these days was something Lloyd Carter wasn't qualified to comment on. Art wasn't his strong point. Art that was hundreds of years old even less so.
But he was a Wayfinder and that made him more than qualified to probe at the sculpture with his slipsense and realize it didn't actually fill the space it seemed to. What looked like glass was actually a very high quality illusion. Lloyd glanced at the museum curator and said, “This is a photosculpt.”
“Yes.” Patrick Trelane was short but very broad, looking like the proverbial ox in a pottery barn, but he moved with a delicate reverence among the artifacts he cared for. Reaching past Lloyd he passed a hand through the place the sculpture should be. Light bent and scattered around his hand, causing the illusory sculpture to sparkle out of existence until he took his hand away. “I noticed it when I was going through the exhibit this morning. The sun through the skylight washed out the photosculpting enough that it became partially transparent.”
Lloyd nodded. “Good timing, I suppose. Any idea how long the original sculpture has been missing?”
“It was definitely in the case two weeks ago when we had it open for the monthly cleaning,” the curator replied. “But I pass through here about that time the First and Fourthday of every week and I didn't notice it last Firstday.”
“You would definitely have noticed the change three days ago?” The question earned Lloyd a withering look. He did his best to hide his exasperation at it. “These questions are a part of my job, Sir Trelane.”
His mood relented. “Of course they are, Wayfinder. Forgive me, it's been a stressful couple of hours since we confirmed the theft.”
“When you say confirmed, I take it to mean you checked to see that it wasn't out for some kind of unscheduled preservation work or because something was wrong with display?” Lloyd looked down at the base of the display cabinet, which stood about waist high. He didn't see any signs of tampering.
“Correct. No one on staff admits to moving the Shellar's Arrival for any reason relating to museum business. Furthermore,” he reached down and tapped the flat top of the display podium. “While we do use a photosculpt to stand in for the original when we have it out on loan or for some kind of retouching the projector is always visible here with a notice on it making it clear that people aren't looking at the original.”
Lloyd cocked his head to one side, surprised that the photosculpt wasn't disrupted by Trelane's action. “Where is that being projected from?”
“Over there.” The curator pointed at a corner of the room about ten feet away where a barely visible dot of light indicated the source of the illusion in front of them. “They were probably forced to put it over there to make the substitution harder to catch. It's a remarkably small thing, really. About the size of my thumb.”
“That can't have been cheap,” Lloyd mused. “Why go to all the expense of making a thing like that to steal a six hundred year old glass sculpture? There's got to be dozens of things in here worth more. Isn't that bust over there carved Martian marble? It's got to be a thousand years old at least and it comes from the Sol System, to boot.”
“Well spotted.” There was a distinct condescending tone to Trelane's voice. Lloyd wasn't sure if the curator was annoyed because he though the fact should be obvious or because he realized Lloyd was just repeating what he'd read off the placard by the sculpture on the way in. “That's Red Invictus, one of only two Sol System works in our entire collection, insured by Halliston's Insurance Agency for half a billion lira. But trying to sell that without getting caught would be impossible unless you got it off planet.”
Trelane waved at a four foot tall bronze statue of a nude woman holding a strange, funnel like basket overflowing with fruits and grain comically arranged to preserve her modesty. “Demeter's Bounty is an early work by Setsuna Higarashi and is insured for 20 million lira, it's something a thief could liquidate pretty easily. By contrast, Shellar's Arrival is valued at 1.2 million lira. A good amount of money, certainly, but nothing life changing. These days a million lira will hardly last you five years and that's if you're careful.”
“Not to mention it's glass, so hard to move without damaging it. So why would someone steal it?” Lloyd mused.
“That's the other bit that's interesting,” Trelane said, handing him a flimsyscreen. “It turns out that Gerald Reed, who sculpted it, is at the heart of a couple of minor conspiracy theories. We've had a number of people ask questions about it over the years, some relating to those theories and some not.”
Lloyd took the flimsy and studied the pictures scrolling over the folding display. There were a total of five people pictured along with brief transcriptions of conversations with museum staff. “Did you ever meet any of these people?”
“Two of the most persistent drew my attention, yes,” Trelane said, indicating two pictures in particular. “This young lady visited sixteen times over the past three years, trying to convince us there was a data crystal built into the sculpture somewhere which is, of course, impossible.”
When he started in the Wayfinders Lloyd traveled to some of the most remote parts of Wireburn and saw a lot of strange stuff. Mixing crystals with glass struck him as entirely possible. “You're sure?”
“All our physical art pieces are scanned annually, both for preservation and insurance purposes and I can assure you, Shellar's Arrival is 100% glass. No part of it could interface with a coral grid. It doesn't have the right chemical markers.”
Lloyd studied the woman's picture. The angle was from above, looking down at her so he couldn't guess her height but her long, dark hair was well kept and her face was pretty and intelligent. She stood with a hand on one hip as she argued with Trelane about something. She wore a conservative, high waisted skirt and unremarkable white blouse with no makeup to speak of and a simple black coat under one arm. Her skin was an unblemished coffee color and her figure was a classical hourglass. Otherwise she was so painfully, deliberately normal it made him suspicious. “Did she say what information she thought the sculpture had on it?”
“A dead reckoning course to Earth.”
His head snapped up from the page. “I'm sorry?”
Trelane laughed. “That was my reaction when I heard her say it but she obviously believes its true. Ever since the Sol System beacons went dark people have come up with all kinds of fanciful ideas for how we could get back there but this is one of the most far fetched I've ever heard. Supposedly Reed was part of the group that destroyed the beacons in the first place. They've then ruled the human diaspora from the shadows for the last fifteen hundred years and hidden all the history of their rule in works of art across a hundred worlds.”
“I'm almost afraid to ask what the other one thought about the sculpture.”
“It's almost mundane by comparison. He thought the sculpture was alive.”
This man's picture was a stark contrast to the woman's in that he was dressed like a wealthy man, wearing a tunic of silvery fabric with the flowing sleeves currently in fashion with people who cared for such things. A bright red vest over top of it confirmed that he was a very style conscious individual. His hair, mustache and thin beard were a dark green and he wore the silver torc of a Shift Scholar. “Was this... Malaki Strazinski a University representative?”
“No. Although he claimed to be from Vanor University when we followed up on that they said no one by that name was on their roles.” Trelane shrugged with equal parts amusement and resignation. “He could be a former student he'd also hardly be the first impostor I've seen just in the six years I worked for the Ashland Prominence Museum. I'm afraid that the art world is full of charlatans, shams and scam artists and, to make matters worse, who is a fake and who is authentic can switch places from day to day. But his claim that the sculpture is alive is just as obviously false as the claim that it's a data crystal. It's been in the museum collection for over eighty years and never shown any signs of life.”
“Until it disappeared,” Lloyd noted.
“The museum has state of the art security, Wayfinder, but I'm sure you could bypass it in a couple of minutes of work. We're a small institution without University backing. There's no way we could afford a resonator to lock the whole building off from the sidereal so anyone with a strong enough slipsense could theoretically turn sidereal just long enough to bypass any physical barriers. We do employ smaller resonators on our most valuable pieces, like Red Invictus, and all our displays have contact sensors in the display base and on the bottom of the piece.” Trelane carefully lifted a small vase on a nearby display to show two small round disks on the bottom. “If the sensors are separated an alarm should go off immediately.”
Lloyd cocked his head to one side. “I don't hear anything.”
“That's just it. The alarms in this room have been bypassed by installing a spoofer in the alarm control circuit that blocks the signal from reaching the security station.”
“Let me guess.” Lloyd pointed up at the corner where the photosculpt projector sat. “The circuit in question runs right under that section of the wall.”
“Got it in one.”
Lloyd folded the flimsyscreen twice and stuck it in the pocket of his leather Wayfinder's jacket. “Would you excuse me for just a moment?”
The curator took two steps back, saying, “Of course.”
Just to be safe Lloyd took one step in the other direction then turned sidereal, pivoting away from material Wireburn and into the sidereal. The planet seemed to fade out of existence, leaving him standing on a dimly glowing ball of light that was Wireburn's presence in the sidereal. Surrounding him was a sea of stars. Of course, the distant lights weren't truly stars but powerful beacons installed at regular intervals over the surface of the planet – and some points above it – to help people with the slipsense navigate. All he would need to do was borrow a little power from the gas giant below him and he'd be able to extend his slipsense to any one of those beacons then slip through the space between them, arriving there instantly. Of course Lloyd had no intention of leaving where he so he ignored them.
Instead he carefully paced about in a tight circle, looking for signs that another person had passed through that part of the sidereal recently. It wasn't an exact science. The sidereal wasn't a physical location but rather a sort of hyperreality that ran alongside everything else and functioned in ways still not entirely understood. So while there were general approaches to turning sidereal, tapping the power there or slipping through space, in practice everyone who could do it did so a little differently. Still, any time a person turned sidereal or material physical space and sidereal space were briefly connected. That left certain signs, at least for a little while.
Lloyd rested his hands on the glassy 's father had taught him that the key to understanding the sidereal was through the hands. A trained touch could tell you a lot about a thing. A loose door would rattle if you pushed it so. A worn jacket would feel thin and threadbare under the hands. Recent changes to the sidereal left peaks and eddies one could find very quickly if they were present. Problem was they weren't. The only thing he could sense was the distant thrum of Wireburn's rotation and the surging power the planet steadily expelled into the sidereal.
So Lloyd checked the physical space he'd just occupied to ensure it was still clear with his slipsense then turned material. He'd been gone maybe five minutes. Trelane's eyes snapped over to him and the curator nodded. “Welcome back, Wayfinder. Find anything interesting?”
“No. But the traces I'm familiar with fade after about twelve hours so that doesn't mean Shellar's Arrival wasn't stolen by someone moving through the sidereal, just that they didn't do it in the last half a day.” Lloyd crossed the room to the photosculpt projector and turned sidereal again. This time he did find something. Not just a trace of recent contact but an active, current connection between sidereal and material created by a very skilled hand. He probed at it with his fingerss for a minute, long enough to determine that it was some kind of sidereal to physical bonding, then left it alone.
He pivoted back to the material and approached Trelane again. The curator gave the projector a curious look as he asked, “Is there something to gather from that device?”
“Possibly, although I'm not familiar enough with sliptech to tell you much about it myself. I suspected it was tied into your system on the sidereal side of things as doing it any other way would have taken a lot of time and that's exactly what it looks like they did. So we are definitely looking for a thief with the sense.” He studied the photosculpted image again. It really was an impressive bit of work, so detailed and high resolution that Lloyd couldn't tell it wasn't a solid object even when he put his face right next to it. “Shame the alarm spoofer and the projector are tied together. It's a beautiful bit of photosculpting and probably just as nice as the original but you don't want to leave it in place.”
“Of course,” Trelane said. “I'll contact someone from the Slipknot Guild to have a look at it and assess how much removing it will cost. Do you think you can locate the thief?”
Lloyd unrolled the flimsyscreen and stared at it while he mulled over his answer. The Museum clearly wanted this handled with discretion otherwise they would have gone straight to the Courts and called in the Lawmen. However they also didn't know who had done it for sure or they'd have called the Theiftaker's Hall. Instead they'd offered a contract to the Wayfinder's Alliance since going strange places and puzzling things out was part and parcel of the Wayfinder's Path even if they did it in very different fashion these days. Slipsense was a prerequisite for membership, which was a nice bonus given the nature of the crime.
The problem was Lloyd wasn't exactly well read. He didn't know much about art and he'd never even seen Shellar's Arrival in person, in sculpt or on screen before his dispatcher sent him to the Museum. There were lots of layers to all this that he could easily miss. “Let me ask you a couple of other things, first. Other than the two we discussed, have any of these people visited the museum in the last year?”
“No.”
“You say all five of these three had theories about the sculpture. What did these other three think was odd about it?”
“Not odd theories in all cases, just that they asked questions about it.” The curator paused to think for a moment. “I believe one of them also thought it was part of a record Green put together on lost human history. One thought it was a forgery. One was convinced that he could prove it was made out of spun sugar rather than glass.”
Lloyd glanced up from the screen. “Really?”
“No. Both claiming forgery and outlandish claims about what an art piece is made out of are common opening gambits by thieves, believe it or not. After we turned them away we never heard from them again.”
Back to the screen. “Which one also thought Shellar's Arrival was hidden history?”
“Sir Tyrel Nance.”
Lloyd pulled a stylus from his pocket and added a note by the appropriate person on the screen. “I see dates for visits from Sir Strazinski and Madame Brahman here. These are their most recent visits?”
“Correct.”
“Is there someone here at the Museum I can call on as a resource in case I need an expert on the art world to consult while I try to locate your stolen property?”
In response Trelane held out his contact card, a thumb sized sheet of plastic and semiconductors that would automatically route a call to his personal voicecaster. Lloyd took it and slid it into the retrieval slot on his own VC and put on his best business smile. “Thank you, Sir Trelane, I'll be in touch.”
For the sake of thoroughness Lloyd followed up with the other three people on the Museum's list first. Other than Tyrel Nance the information the Museum had on file for them proved bogus. The home address for one of them was a dilapidated electronics store the other was a proper apartment building but none of the staff there had ever heard of the person in question. Lloyd was happy to write them off as scammers who ran off once Trelane rebuffed their efforts.
Nance was a different matter. He supposedly lived on the grounds of Onieda University, Ashland Campus and Lloyd expected to have a lot of difficulty getting anything out of them. After all, the Universities were interstellar organizations able to hold up noble sounding ideas like learning and knowledge as shields. Oneida alone boasted tens of millions of scholars on hundreds of planets. By contrast, the Wayfinder's Alliance had thousands of members across Wireburn and its moon, Coldstone. That was the extent of their reach.
However, when Lloyd inquired at the Visitor's Office they ran a quick check and informed him Tyrel Nance died of liver failure fifteen months ago after years of chronic drinking issues. Lloyd marked the man off his screen and headed for his next destination.
Lavanya Brahman didn't live on Ashland Prominence, at least according to the information she gave to the Museum. Given her sixteen visits to the Museum in three years, that suggested she was either independently wealthy or she had the slipsense and could hop between prominences via the sidereal. Either way, Lloyd decided he would visit her last.
That left Malaki Strazinski, a resident of Ashland's lower east side neighborhood known as Dynetown. A quick consultation with his map told him how many beacons he'd have to move and in what directions. Then Lloyd turned sidereal and gratefully left the University behind, slipping through the sidereal from beacon to beacon until he turned material again near the bottom of the prominence. It was his first time visiting the lower reaches of eastern Ashland and he found it quite beautiful.
Wireburn's many prominences were towering mixes of helium, methane and mineral vines. The strange mix of metal and plant life stretched far down into the murky oceans of the Jovian planet's depths and held their structure by virtue of the heavy metals within supported by the buoyant gasses they trapped. Dynetown looked out over a storm front where helium and methane seas clashed creating a constant, slowly moving orange and tan waves from which the region took its name. The bright light of Wireburn's blue sun dispersed in the gasses and took on a warm glow.
Unlike the upper regions, which reinforced the thin branches of mineral vine with liquid granite to hold the weight of the structures built there, Dynetown was built directly on the vines. Instead of the gray-white swirl of most roads above the ground here was an oily mix of blue and orange. The buildings were smaller than the upper levels. Most were only a single story high, clinging close to the ground to avoid the vine branches overhead. Unlike the Museum or University buildings there were no graceful arches and buttresses adorning the structures. Dynetown was a jumble of residences and small workshops. The buildings were a mix of small, walled compounds with colonnades and high, thin windows and blocky, purposeful boxes with fluted sides to add a touch of decoration.
The people were dressed much better than Lloyd was. Most people were dressed in a variation of Strazinski's clothes from the museum picture, silvery metallic fabrics made of threads extracted from mineral vines cut in three piece suits, double breasted jackets or smart, high waisted dresses full of ruffles and lace. The look of most people was somewhere between the University square and the high flying towers of the upper crust.
In contrast the red leather Wayfinder jacket and boots he wore screamed of a life on the outskirts. There was a time the Wayfinder was a prestigious role. Lloyd remembered looking up to the men in red as figures of adventure and exploration only a decade ago, when he was a teenager. But even then their status was slipping away. At one time Wayfinders went to the uncharted sections of Wireburn and set up beacons there; then helped ferry in new settlers via the sidereal. On a planet the size of a Jovian world it was the kind of work you could expect to last centuries.
The discovery of the Great Jellies living in the helium seas effectively ended the purpose of Wayfinders the year Lloyd was born. At least the huge, sentient creatures that called the lower regions of Wireburn home weren't hostile. However they were so friendly they'd gladly shared all they knew about the planet with humanity in exchange for an education in sidereal technology from the Slipknot Guild. With the Jellies' maps to work from the Wayfinders were abruptly out of work about the time Lloyd joined up.
He'd spent a few years setting up beacons on far flung prominences before coming home to Ashland. Now, like all the other Wayfinders, he worked more as an oddjobs man taking any commission that called for the slipsense. There were a few odd looks from other pedestrians as Lloyd searched for Strazinski's house. He ignored them to the best of his ability.
On the bright side, self-consciousness was not a failing of the Carter family but in an unfamiliar place surrounded by people very different from himself Lloyd found his mind turning a bit paranoid. He did his best to shed that mindset. Out in the wilds, with no breathable atmosphere or pressure barriers to keep Wireburn's gravity and skies from crushing you, letting panic or dread seize hold was just as dangerous as recklessness. In the years since he first took an investigative commission from the Alliance he'd found the same was true of interviews. He needed to be at his best when Strazinski answered his door.
After ten minutes walking from the Dynetown beacon Lloyd arrived at Malaki Strazinski's home. It was one of the rare two story houses in the neighborhood with a colonnade running along the front of the building's first floor. The second floor jutted out over the colonnade, tall windows looking out over the street like curious eyes. Lloyd took a minute to adjust the display of his flimsyscreen so it only showed the information relevant to his subject then folded it back up and put it away. Straightened his jacket, checked his belt, smoothed his hair. Then put on his public face, relaxed shoulders and a half smile, and walked up to the house to ring the bell.
In his experience an answer between thirty and sixty seconds after the bell rang was not suspicious. Anything faster meant he was expected. Anything slower suggested someone inside had taken the time to hide something or someone before answering. Lloyd suspected that houses with staff would throw off that assessment but he'd never visited one of those. Nor was he about to start.
Malaki Strazinski answered the door fifty two counts after Lloyd rang. He was dressed in a coppery colored tunic that hung around his thighs and he had his sleeves rolled up. With no belt or shoes on he looked very much like he'd been relaxing at home until just seconds ago. He raised one eyebrow and said, “Can I help you, sir?”
“Hello, I'm Wayfinder Lloyd Carter.” To emphasize his statement Lloyd indicated the Alliance badge sewn over the left breast of his jacket that included the compass points emblem of the Wayfinders and Lloyd's personal membership number. “I am here on behalf of the Ashland Prominence Museum of Fine Art in accordance with the Ashland Public Order Act of 944. Are you able to answer a few questions?”
Strazinski gave him a cool look. “What about?”
“The Museum is looking into some information you provided about one of their art pieces,” Lloyd said. The half lie sat poorly with him, even though he knew it was technically true and would hopefully catch the other man's interest enough to get his foot in the door. These kind of gambits made him uncomfortable but they were a part of this kind of job. “I'm obliged to remind you that no Court on Wireburn compels your cooperation with this investigation but your response here may influence future decisions by the Wayfinder Alliance and Theiftaker's Halls if you attempt to hire them in the future.”
Strazinski turned from cool to sour. “Yes, so I've heard. All right, come in then.”
He yanked the door wide open and ushered Lloyd into a spacious room. It was something of a great hall, open to both levels of the home with the towering windows overhead filling the room with natural light. Most of the room was a step lower than the entrance, although a pathway ran along the side of the room into other parts of the house. In the sunken part of the room there was a padded bench along the windows that looked out towards the street and a selection of comfortable looking furniture arranged to facilitate conversation. A large coffee table sat at the center of the room.
However Strazinsky didn't offer Lloyd a seat, instead leading him along the walkway into the kitchen, which was immediately behind the great room. This was a more normal arrangement of cabinets and appliances with an island at the center. The beginnings of a finsnake roast were scattered around the island and the pleasing scent of spices was evident before they even crossed the threshold. As he spoke Strazinski grabbed a knife and started slicing tubers. “I'm always surprised when I hear Wayfinders are doing Theiftaker work,” he said, the blade clack-clack-clacking on his wooden cutting board. “You boys used to make the sightcasters for finding new things or saving people in danger on the helium tides.”
“Now we find old things,” Lloyd admitted. “Sometimes that puts people in danger, although I can't say they don't always deserve it. What makes you think I'm here on Theiftaker work, though?”
“You mentioned the Public Order Act. That's the one prompted them to open the Theiftaker's Hall, isn't it?”
The Public Order Act was a lot more complicated than that but Lloyd only knew that because he didn't understand the act at all. “Why did you tell the Museum you were a member of Vanor University? You have to know they'd check on that.”
Strazinski snorted. “Because I studied art there but the administration refused to give me my degree. I'm not a scholar, true, but I did study there and I refuse to pretend I didn't just because they struck me from the rolls for arguing with a Professor who wasn't even in my department. Now why are you here, Wayfinder. The Museum wouldn't hire you just to come and ask me questions about something they could find out in thirty seconds on a voicecaster.”
He'd have to be more direct, then. Subtle interrogation techniques were something he'd tried to learn but never been very good at. “What do you know about a sculpture called Shellar's Arrival?”
“It was supposedly made of glass about six hundred years ago by a man who doesn't exist,” Strazinski said, scooping his tubers into a pot. “The Reed Group created a series of computer protocols intended to create a general artificial intelligence that was embedded into the glass via Slipknot techniques.”
“General artificial intelligence isn't real. People have been trying to make them for thousands of years and no one has ever succeeded. The closest we've gotten is zombie programs that emulate the behavior of dead people.”
Strazinski took a long, two pronged fork and skewered his roast then started carving a crosshatched pattern onto the top of it. “Still. All the evidence points to it.”
Lloyd resisted the urge to laugh at him. All the evidence pointed to the Wayfinders as a meaningful career fifteen years ago. Evidence wasn't as meaningful as University people tended to think it was. “Were you aware it was stolen yesterday?”
“It's alive, so I suppose I'd say it's kidnapped.” The other man offered the response with a mechanical detachment that suggested Strazinski was thinking about something other than what he was saying. He set his knife and fork down and leveled an even look at Lloyd. “So does the Museum think I took it?”
“You've approached them about it repeatedly,” Lloyd said. “It's a natural question to ask, isn't it? Did you steal Shellar's Arrival?”
“No. Because that's categorically impossible, as I've been saying for quite some time.”
It wasn't why he was there but at this point Lloyd's curiosity was starting to get the better of him. “Sir Strazinski, why are you so convinced the sculpture is alive? What purpose would that serve?”
“I told you, I'm an artist. Glass isn't my medium of choice but I respect it all the same.”
“What is your medium? Photosculpts?”
The other man's right eye twitched almost imperceptibly. “Among other things. I also work in paint. You could consider food a medium of its own and I hold a couple of patents for visioncaster components. I dabbled quite a bit in University, actually, another reason I can't believe they struck me from the rolls. I don't just study broadly, though, I do study in depth as well. I know most of the works created by Wireburn natives and believe me, without going into the details of our artistic lineages, Shellar's Arrival doesn't show any signs of those traditions. But there's more than that.” He folded both his hands and pressed them flat against the counter top. “I've studied almost every picture and photosculpt of that piece ever taken and I promise you this, the sculpture changes over time.”
“The Museum scans it every year,” Lloyd protested. “They say it hasn't.”
Strazinski raised his hands, index fingers held parallel like he was framing a picture. “I know. I know, they told me the same thing and I've gotten confirmation from the insurance company. I haven't figured out how that's faked yet but it is. I can show you.”
This was starting to sound very far fetched. Mentally Lloyd crossed Malaki Strazinski off his list, convinced that someone willing to wander so far into pure conjecture would never marshal the wherewithal to rob a museum on his own. “Very interesting, Sir Strazinski, but ultimately it doesn't explain why someone would go to all the trouble to make and hide this living sculpture you describe, much less tell me where Shellar's Arrival is now.”
“Wouldn't just making the thing be a triumph in itself?” Strazinski asked with the pure hearted sincerity of a true idealist. “It would be worth it just for that.”
“And if that wasn't enough it's also the perfect caretaker for humanity's greatest secret.”
A cold spike drove between Lloyd's shoulder blades when he heard the woman's clear, pleasant contralto join the conversation. Before he even turned to look he suspected who he'd find. So when he backed away from the kitchen's island and turned to look back into the great room he also pivoted halfway into the sidereal. Sure enough, there was Lavanya Brahman, watching him from the other side of the kitchen door.
The world around him rippled as Lavanya also pivoted halfway into the sidereal. Where Lloyd had bladed his body to present both her and Strazinski with as small a target as possible Lavanya adjusted her stance to put her front fully towards him as she tapped power from the planet's reserves. Her hair, pinned back by two long, copper sticks, flooded with sidereal light and whipped free and around her body like a veil.
That was a manifestation he'd never encountered. Still, while it was exotic it wasn't particularly powerful compared to some of the guys he'd sparred against in the Wayfinder and Theiftaker circles. Lloyd tapped the planet himself and let the Wireburn's strength focus in his hands.
Over at the kitchen counter Strazinski put his knife down with a long suffering noise. “Is this really necessary?”
Then, to Lloyd's disappointment, the artist also pivoted into the sidereal. For a brief moment Lloyd had hoped only one of the two had a slipsense. One on one he was confident he could take most people outside professional warriors. Two on one it was another matter entirely. Or at least that was his calculation before Strazinski reached up to touch his fingertips to his temples and tapped power to manifest his sidereal aspect.
Strings of numbers, half formed sentences and partially rendered sketches exploded out of the man's head in wheels of glowing concepts that swelled beyond the confines of the physical room. A planet like Wireburn threw enough energy into the sidereal for trillions of people to tap without ever running out. How much of that power a single person could tap essentially came down to the capacity of their slipsense. Based on what he was seeing Lloyd estimated Strazinski to have the third or forth largest capacity of anyone he'd ever met. Even one on one he was pretty sure the artist could beat him.
Time for a change in tactics. “It's not necessary, Sir Strazinski,” Lloyd said. “Not so long as you tell me where the sculpture is. And don't bother pretending you don't have it any more, the only reason for the two of you to act this way is if you have it.”
“Which is why I told you to remain upstairs,” Strazinski said, his attention briefly resting on Lavanya. “I told you I could send him away.”
“I agree that would have been the best outcome.” There was a brief ripple from within her veil of hair as Lavanya slipped something from elsewhere in the sidereal to the spot where she stood. “However after listening to your conversation Oliver insisted he speak to Sir Carter.”
“You've got a third person in on this?” Lloyd asked. “Next you're going to tell me Tyrel Nance didn't drink himself to death.”
“Almost certainly murdered,” Strazinski said.
Lloyd resisted the urge to roll his eyes, focusing instead on the object Lavanya held out to him. He was expecting a voicecaster. Perhaps even a sightcaster or one of those very new photocasters, the two of them looked like they could afford that kind of thing. Instead she presented him with a set of three clear crystal pyramids connected to an orb. Well, one of the pyramids was anchored by its base to the orb with the point of the shape facing down. The other two pyramids extended from adjacent faces of the first pyramid in an upwards direction. Art wasn't Lloyd's strongest point but he found himself thinking of it as a very simplified representation of an angel.
In the sidereal the structure glowed from within, almost as if it, too, could created power like a planet or a star would. The crystal structure rose into the air of its own volition, tilted so the 'face' of the orb was towards Lloyd and said, “Greetings, Wayfinder Carter. I am O-14312, called by my creator 'Oliver,' a name I find many humans prefer. I ask that for the moment, you refrain from violence for the services of a trained navigator are something I will soon require.”
They say that the first Wayfinder to discover a Great Jelly floating in the depths of the helium seas didn't even hesitate when the Jelly spoke in his mind. The story goes that he was so prepared for the unexpected he accepted the creature's friendly overtures at once. Lloyd was not quite so resilient. He stared blankly at Oliver for a full five seconds before he recovered. As soon as he did little details clicked in place. The creature was about two feet tall and its 'wings' were about four feet wide and if you adjusted the proportions of it... If he'd guessed wrong and it was made of glass and not crystal... “You're the Shellar's Arrival. I'll be damned. It really was a living record of lost history. How is that possible?”
“Assuming I had the knowledge to explain them to you – which I do not – the details of my creation would take years of theoretical and practical education for most people to understand,” Oliver replied. It's shape seemed to melt and shift for a few seconds then it floated in the air, a perfect replica of the sculpture. Or, in this case, a perfect original of it. “As you say, I hid my physical vessel among the works of a somewhat famous sculpture when I went dormant. My sidereal essence I buried in the seas of Wireburn. But the time has come for me to revitalize myself and so, although I know many value my vessel as a thing of beauty, I can no longer remain as such. Please allow my friends to continue assisting me unimpeded.”
“Well, I don't think there's really anything in Ashland law that covers this particular possibility,” Lloyd said, letting his sidereal power slip away into the planet and turning physical once more. To his surprise Oliver's appearance changed very little when he did. The odd glass creature looked much the same to both his eyes and slipsense, which was unusual. “It'll take a while to explain all this to the Museum and the Alliance, though.”
“Actually, I was rather hoping you wouldn't,” Oliver said.
“Why not?”
“For starters, they won't believe you,” Strazinski said as he and Lavanya also turned fully away from the sidereal. “Trust me, I know that from personal experience. And even if they did, don't think that they won't try and keep ahold of Oliver just for the sake of clinging to something they think is theirs. I know the midset of these kinds of people.”
“And we don't have the time to be sitting around waiting for all of them to grow tired of arguing about it,” Lavanya added. “Do that and you'll still be waiting when the universe grows cold and dark.”
“That is less than ideal,” Oliver agreed. “I have much that needs doing after such a long dormant period.”
“And what exactly are these things that need doing?” Lloyd asked, questioning whether he could just ignore such a major discovery as the one he'd just made. He could see not telling the Museum. Trelane struck him as the type to hang on to Oliver, living creature or no, just because he hated having an empty display area. But not telling anyone about a new kind of creature cut against his Wayfinder instincts. That was the kind of discovery he'd signed up for. Not to mention he wasn't sure Oliver was a safe, friendly kind of a thing.
Before they'd given up on making artificial life mankind's stories were full of the dangers such things presented after all.
“I have many preparations for travel to make, not least of which include securing a slipship and a navigator to help me travel the stars,” Oliver said. “There are also other constructs like myself I may attempt to find. But ultimately, although there are no beacons and the way is long since lost, I must make my way back to Earth and for that I need your skills.”
“You said Wayfinders find old things now, instead of new,” Lavanya said. “This is your chance to do a little of both.”
To his surprise, Lloyd realized his mind was made up before the words were out of her mouth. “I accept.”
