“Why’d you bother? I’ve never known you to show an interest in physics.”
He shrugged and finished his coffee. Then he got up and looked at the cup. “You want any?”
“No. It keeps me awake all day.”
He grinned, left the room, and came back with two cups. “Can’t afford to have you sleeping on the job.” He put it down in front of me. “Chase, have you ever heard of Sola Kylin?” I’d heard the name but couldn’t pin it down. “She wrote a few years ago.”
“Oh yes. I remember. She claimed that black holes are . That you can’t trust them to just stay in place and let you alone.”
“That’s correct.”
“I think it was a best seller.”
“She says that black holes are exceedingly complicated structures. And when you add the quantum effect, you get a very strange creature.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“That’s what all the physicists said too. But she was at the top of the charts for six months.”
“Alex, that would suggest that stars are alive too. You don’t buy any of this, do you?”
“Of course not. She mentions that we’ve gone through eras when people believed the planets they lived on were alive. Remember ?” His eyes narrowed. “It sounds ridiculous but I couldn’t resist asking Benjamin about it.”
“Benjamin Holverson?” He’s a physicist who’s been a client and a friend for a good many years. “What did he say?”
“About black holes being alive? That it’s lunacy. Life is too complex to be able to operate in that kind of crushed condition.”
I picked up the coffee. “Even if it alive, I don’t see how it could reach out and create a problem for something in orbit.”
“Kylin says it can manipulate gravity. That at those levels it wouldn’t take much to draw in an orbiting station. Just for the record, though, I’m not serious about this.”
“Good.”
“By the way, did you know that Harding’s trophy wasn’t the only link we had to Octavia?”
“No, I wasn’t aware there was anything else.”
“You know who Charlotte Hill is, right?”
“Sure. The only woman on board.”
“She was apparently an extraordinarily good chess player. And she owned an unusual set. Her family brought it with them when they moved to Rimway a few years ago. The chess set was aluminum, and the design hasn’t been around for a thousand years.” He raised his voice slightly. “Jacob, can you show us a picture of it?”
The set appeared on the coffee table by the window. It was similar to the classic Staunton chess pieces that had been available in all cultures since the beginning of the space age. Probably before that. But there were differences. The pieces were more compact, the queen’s crown had lost its sharp edges, and the king’s no longer had a cross. The knight looked annoyed, and the bishop’s edges were more curved than the Staunton model. The black-and-white coloring was somewhat faded. “As far as I know,” Alex said, “there isn’t another one on the planet.”
We handle substantial numbers of artifacts in our listings, and I probably don’t pay as much attention to them as I should once they’ve gone on the block. Unless there’s a problem. There’d been several chess sets over the years, but with one or two exceptions they’d always been the standard model, of interest only because of the owner’s identity. And my involvement usually had to do with verifying certification. “I don’t recall our ever having access to it. Did we sell it or something?” I asked. “The chess set?”
“No. It disappeared after her death. Charlotte’s mother, Olivia Hill, contacted me a year or so ago to find out if we might have any idea what had happened to it, whether we might have seen it on the auction listings. She was hoping to get it back.”
“So you’ve been looking into it.”
“Yes.” He was smiling. “I got a response while I was on the road. From Paul Holton.” Holton was a long-time client. He put the message on-screen:
Traymont was a time zone away.
Outside, a mollok was hanging from a tree limb gazing in at us. He was smiling at something, and when Alex waved at him, he waved back. I couldn’t resist going into the kitchen for a banana. Alex was frowning when I returned with it. “You do that,” he said, “and it’ll be out there every morning.”
“Special credit at salvation.” I opened the window and tossed the banana. The mollok caught it on the fly, chittered happily, and began peeling and eating it.
Alex rolled his eyes. “Jacob,” he said, “connect us with Kimberley.”
I gave him my chair and backed off so I’d be out of the conversation. After a minute we heard a woman’s voice.
“Yes.”
She blinked on in front of my desk. There was a shyness about her that clashed with a pair of expressive amber eyes. Her hair was dark and cut short, and she wore a golden knit crop top and soft blue jeans.
“Ms. Morris, I understand you own a chess set that once belonged to Charlotte Hill?”
“Would you be interested in selling?”
“How much are you asking?”
“That was the last millennium, wasn’t it?”
Jamison was the last human to win a world chess title anywhere in the Confederacy.
“And you have others?”
“Call me Alex, please. Our interest in the chess set is that Charlotte Hill was the daughter of a client.”
“No. They’ve never been able to figure it out.”
“Yes. It would mean a great deal to her. I have to tell you though that she doesn’t have a lot of resources.”
Kim said.
“May I ask how you obtained it?”
“How did she come to have it, do you know?”
“Before we begin discussing compensation, be aware that Charlotte Hill designated her parents as heirs. She left everything to them. So unless Mary Stroud can show a formal transaction providing ownership, it would belong legally to Charlotte’s mom.”