I picked up the diary. This was where I expected, hoped, to find everything laid out, explanations of what he and Robin were trying to do. Maybe I'd even get a sense of what had happened on that final fatal night. So I opened it, in Gregory's presence, and made no effort to disguise my disappointment. It covered only his junior and senior years in high school. Mostly it was a record of love affairs and occasional conquests.
“We did it,” he reported at the beginning of one entry. “I never thought Molly would go along. She always went just so far and backed off. But we did it. O happy day-!”
Damn.
O happy day.
So we went through the pictures. I didn't know any of the people in them, except of course Cermak and Robin. And Gregory. Gregory agreed to identify everybody, provided I increased the remuneration. Remuneration might not have been in his vocabulary, actually. “This is taking up my time,” he said by way of explanation. “And I should warn you up front that some of these people, a lot of them, actually, I don't know.”
Whatever Eliot had been, Gregory was not. He grumbled that I wasn't moving fast enough. He ignored Vella when she arrived with some muffins and fruit juice. She'd probably been attractive when she took her place with him at the altar. He rolled his eyes a lot and didn't seem able to get comfortable in his chair.
Nevertheless, he helped and I made notes. “This was Dr. Farley, the family physician. That was one of Eliot's girlfriends. Yolinda Something-or-other. Don't know who this one is. Oh, yes, that's Talia, his first wife.”
“He was married?”
“Twice. The other one was, um-” He pushed back in his chair, opened the door to the living room, and called to his wife. “Vella, what was the name of Eliot's second wife?”
“Akri,” she said.
“They divorced him?” I asked. “Both wives?”
“Talia did. Akri, I think, just let the marriage lapse.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“It hardly matters now.”
And here was the picture of Cermak and Robin that had been in the book. And a few more. A couple with Cermak and Akri. One showing Robin sitting in the right-hand seat in a cockpit. “The Breakwater?” I asked.
Gregory shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”
“You were never in it?”
“No. Not me. I like to keep both feet on the ground.”
More pictures from the cockpit. In one, Eliot was looking out at an enormous set of rings. Robin, in another, was just sitting, trying to smile, and not doing a very good job of it, while the same rings cut across the wraparound. I wondered where they were. The instrument panel was visible, but I couldn't make out any details. Blowing it up wasn't likely to help. Still, there was always a possibility. “Can you make a copy of this one, Greg?” I asked.
He looked at it as if he might be giving away something I should be paying for. But he shrugged and directed the AI to make a print.
Then a surprise: a picture of Robin's house on Virginia Island. In fading sunlight. And a shot of the ocean, taken from the bluff. And one of Elizabeth, looking out to sea. All three pictures were moody, placid, somehow wistful. Taken at the same time of day.
Then we had Eliot lifting off in a skimmer. “That was the last time I saw him,” said Gregory. “It was my father's funeral. We had a memorial service, and afterward he left, went out to wherever it was with Chris Robin. He came back just in time to get killed by the quake.”
“Who took the picture?”
“My son Creviss. Creviss always wanted to be a pilot. Be just like his uncle.”
“Did he do it, Gregory?”
“No. He became a lawyer. Don't know which is worse.”
Jack McDevitt
Firebird
ELEVEN
The value of an object is whatever we assign it to be. It is not anchored in economics, but in the imagination.
— Timothy Zhin-Po, Night Thoughts, 10,002 C.E.
I was on my approach to the country house when Straight Talk started. Deryk Colter was their guest. Colter was an historian, tall and thin and passionate. He'd made a career of finding fault with Alex, and immediately after sitting down, he began going on about the sanctity of the past and how we could not seriously progress unless we learned from it. He was appalled at the dearth of historical knowledge by the general public. And he was particularly dismayed by those who understood the importance of looking back, of avoiding the same old blunders, but who nevertheless saw no contradiction in robbing humanity of its cultural heritage, of trampling it for profit. He was, of course, speaking of Alex. “The man is insufferable,” he was saying as I started down toward the landing pad. “He's trying to make Chris Robin look like an erratic genius who may have opened a door to other realities, then walked through it. The truth is that Robin probably wasn't paying attention to what he was doing and fell into the ocean. Anyone who's ever been out to Virginia Island knows how easily that could have happened. Maybe he had a little too much to drink. In any case, Benedict is not to be taken seriously. Not in this matter. And I don't mean to take anything away from his achievements. I grant him all that. But in the end, he's a salesman, and he can't be trusted.”
The host, Charles Koeffler, managed to look disconcerted. “What you're saying, Deryk, is that he'll do anything for money. Is that your position?”
I shut the thing off before Colter could answer. And I came down on the pad a bit harder than I might have. The AI quietly pointed out that he'd warned me several times about listening to talk shows while I was running the skimmer.
I grumbled something, climbed out, and walked toward the house, not sure whether I was more annoyed with Colter or with the AI. Jacob opened the door for me and said hello. I said hello back, went inside, took off my jacket, dropped my notebook on my desk, and wondered why I was living in a place with such a cold climate.
I was still getting settled when Alex came downstairs. He was smiling, looking as if he'd just left a party. “Welcome home, beautiful,” he said. “This place feels empty without you.”
I was in no mood for banter. “Alex, I don't know why you keep doing this. These guys are ripping us apart.”
“You mean Garland?”
“No. Has he been torching us, too? I was talking about Colter-”
“Yeah. Well, we're a pretty good target at the moment. But they're playing right into our hands. Giving us more traction. The interest in the Robin artifacts is going through the roof. By the way, we'll be running the auction in a couple of days.”
“What about your reputation?”
“I'll be fine. Chase, if you do anything creative, anything at all, you have to learn to live with critics. The charges aren't true. All I've done is bring to public attention the fact that Robin had some unusual preoccupations. And I reminded them that he'd disappeared. Those guys, Garland and Colter and the rest, this is their only chance to get out in front of an audience. Relax.”
“I don't think we should let them get away with it.”
“I'm not much interested in throwing mud. Our clients trust us. That's what's important.”
“That's not the only thing that's important.”
He grinned. “I'm glad to have you looking out for me.”
“I don't like being insulted by those idiots.”
“I know. Well, for what it's worth, I've arranged to be on Kile's show tonight.” He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Chase, not to change the subject or anything, but did you know that, the night of Robin's disappearance, the investigators were able to determine that only three skimmers left Virginia Island?”
“I hadn't heard that. But one would have been enough to carry him off. I assume they checked them out?”
“One was Cermak. The other two were locals, and the police were convinced neither could have been involved in his disappearance.”
“I can't see how they could make that determination.”
“From tracker readings. They wouldn't be definite, but they'd be close enough.”