“Nonsense. The two of you come along. I’ve been considering bids for half a ton of Vegan light sculptures.”
“From the Republic period?” Katin asked.
“Alas, no. Then we might be able to get them off our hands. But they’re a hundred years too early to be worth anything. Come.” As she led them among the mounted canvases, she glanced down at the wide metal bracelet that covered her wrist socket. One of the micro-dials was blinking.
“Excuse me, young man.” She turned to Katin. “You have a … recorder of some sort with you?”
“Why … yes, I do.”
“I have to ask you not to use it here.”
“Oh. I wasn’t—“
“Not so much recently, but often I have had problems maintaining privacy.” She laid her wrinkled hand on his arm. “You will understand? There’s an automatic erasing field that will completely clear the machine should it go on.”
“Katin’s on my crew, Cyana. But it’s a very different crew from the last one. There’s no secrecy any more.”
“So I gathered.” She took her hand away. Katin watched it fall back to the white brocade.
She said—and both Katin and Lorq looked up when she said it—“When I arrived at the museum this morning there was a message for you from Prince.”
They reached the galley’s end.
She turned briefly to Lorq. “I’m taking you at your word about secrecy.” Her eyebrows made a bright metallic stroke on her face.
Lorq’s brows were metal rusted; the stroke was broken by his scar. Still, Katin thought, that must be part of the family’s marking.
“Is he on Vorpis?”
“I have no idea.” The door dilated and they passed through. “But he knows you’re here. Isn’t that what’s important?”
“I just arrived at the spacefield an hour and a half ago. I leave tonight.”
“The message arrived about an hour and twenty-five minutes ago. Its origin was conveniently garbled so the operators couldn’t have it traced without a lot of difficulty. They’re going through that difficulty now—“
“Don’t bother.” He said to Katin: “What will he have to say this time?”
“We shall all see fairly soon,” Cyana said. “You say no secrecy. I would still prefer to talk in my office.”
This gallery was confusion: a storage room, or material for an exhibit not yet sorted.
Katin was going to, but Lorq asked first: “Cyana, what is this junk?”
“I believe”—she looked at the date in gold decalcomania on the ancient wooden case – 1923: the Aeolian Corporation. Yes, they’re a collection of twentieth-century musical instruments. That’s an Ondes Martinot, invented by a French composer of the same name in 1942. Over here we have”—she bent to read the tag—“a Duo Arts Player Piano made in 1931. And this thing is … Mill’s Violano Virtuoso, built in 1916.”
Katin peered through the glass door in the front of the violano.
Strings and hammers, stops, fobs, and plectra hung in shadow.
“What did it do?”
“It stood in bars and amusement parks. People would put a coin in the slot and it would automatically play a violin that’s on the stand in there with a player-piano accompaniment, programmed on a perforated paper roll.” She moved her silver nail to a list of titles. “’The Darktown Strutters’ Ball’” … “ The moved on through the clutter of theremins, encore banjoes, and hurdy-gurdies. “Some of the newer academics question the institute’s preoccupation with the twentieth century. Nearly one out of four of our galleries is devoted to it.” She folded her hands on brocade. “Perhaps they resent that it has been the traditional concern of scholars for eight hundred years; they refuse to see the obvious. At the beginning of that amazing century, mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that lived on several worlds. Since then, the number of worlds has increased; our informative unity has changed its nature several times, suffered a few catastrophic eruptions, but essentially it has remained. Until man becomes something much, much different, that time must be the focus of scholarly interest: that was the century in which we became.”
“I have no sympathy with the past,” Lorq announced. “I have no time for it.”
“It intrigues me,” Katin offered. “I want to write a book; perhaps it will deal with that.”
Cyana looked up. “You do? What sort of book?”
“A novel, I think.”
“A novel?” They passed beneath the gallery’s announcement screen: gray.
“You’re going to write a novel. How fascinating. I had an antiquarian friend some years ago who attempted to write a novel. He only finished the first chapter. But he claimed it was a terribly illuminating experience and gave him a great deal of insight into just exactly how the process took place.”
“I’ve been working on it for quite some time, actually,” Katin volunteered.
“Marvelous. Perhaps, if you finish, you’ll allow the institute to take a psychic recording under hypnosis of your creative experience. We have an operable twenty-second-century printing press. Perhaps we’ll print up a few million and distribute them with a documentary psychoramic survey to libraries and other educational institutions. I’m sure I could raise some interest in the idea among the board.”
“I hadn’t even thought about getting it printed … “ They reached the next gallery.
“Through the Alkane is the only way you might. Do keep it in mind.”
“I … will.”
“When is this mess going to be straightened out, Cyana?”
“Dear nephew, we have much more material than we can possibly display. It has to go somewhere. There are over twelve hundred public and seven hundred private galleries in the museum. As well as three thousand five hundred storage rooms. I’m fairly acquainted with the contents of most of them. But not all.”
They ambled beneath high ribs. Vertebrae arched toward the roofing. Cold ceiling lights cast the shadow of teeth and socket on the brass pedestal of a skull the size of an elephant’s hip.
“It looks like a comparative exhibit of reptilian osteology between Earth and … “ Katin gazed through bone cages. “I couldn’t tell you where that thing comes from.”
Blade of scapula, pelvic saddle, clavicle bow …
“Just how far away is your office, Cyana?”
“About eight hundred yards as the arolat flies. We take the next lift.”
They walked through the archway into the lift-well.
The spiral carrier took them up some dozens of floors.
A corridor of plush and brass.
Another corridor, with a glass wall …
Katin gasped: all Phoenix patterned below them, from central towers to fog-lapped wharf. Though the Alkane was no longer the tallest building in the galaxy, it was by far the tallest in Phoenix.
A ramp curved into the building’s heart. Along the marbled wall hung the seventeen canvases in the Dehay sequence, Under Sirius.
“Are these the …?”
“Nyles Selvin’s molecular-reproduction forgeries, done in twenty-eight hundred at Vega. For a long time they were more famous than the originals—which are downstairs on display in the South Green Chamber—but there’s so much history connected with the forgeries Bunny decided to hang them here.”
And a door.
“Here we are.”
It opened on darkness.
“Now, nephew of mine,”—As they stepped inside, three shafts of light fell from someplace high to circle them on the black carpet—“would you be so good as to explain to me why you are back? And what is all this business with Prince?” She turned to face Lorq.
“Cyana, I want another nova.”
“You what?”