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.
“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.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Whatever it was, it was there, and it wasn’t human. But the eyes were intelligent. It looked right through me.”
“Okay,” he said. “We don’t go in the water anymore, right?”
She was swallowing, trying to get control of herself. “Right,” she said. Her voice trembled.
“Couldn’t have been a squid or something, could it? Something that followed you in?”
“The lake’s fresh water.”
Solly didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then: “Did you get a picture of it?”
“No,” she said. “I was a little busy.”
“So what do you think it was?”