Kim Robinson - The Planet on the Table

When my vision swam back I saw it was George Butler. “What’s going on?” he asked, very politely for a man who had just been jumped on by Freya Grindavik.

“Don’t ask us,” Freya said irritably.

“Murder!” shrieked Lucinda from the hallway that led from the atrium directly back to the patio. We jumped up and crowded into the hallway. Just beyond a mirror shattered into many pieces lay a man’s body; apparently he had been crawling toward the patio when he collapsed, and one arm and finger extended ahead of him, pointing to the patio still.

Freya approached, gingerly turned the body’s head. “It’s that Musgrave fellow,” she said, blinking to clear her sight. “He’s dead all right. Struck on the head with the mirror there, no doubt.”

Heidi Van Seegeren joined us. “What’s going on?”

“That was my question.” George Butler said.

Freya explained the situation in her.

“Call the police,” Heidi said to Lucinda. “And I suppose no one should leave.”

I sighed.

And so crime detection ensnared me once again. I helped Freya by circulating on the patio, calming the shocked and nervous guests. “Urn, excuse me, very sorry to inform you, yes, sorry—hard to believe, yes—somebody had it in for the secretary Musgrave, it appears,” all the while watching to see if anyone would jump, or turn pale, or start to run when I told them. Then, of course. I had to lead gently to the idea that everyone had gone from guest to suspect, soon to be questioned by Freya and the police. “No, no, of course you’re net suspected of anything, furthest thing from our minds, it’s just that Freya wants to know if there’s anything you saw that would help,” and so on. Then I had to do the difficult scheduling of Freya’s interviews, at the same time I was supposed to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. Oh, the watson does the dirty work, all right. No wonder we always look dense when the detective unveils the solutions; we never have the time even to get the facts straight, much less meditate on their meaning. All I got that day were fragments: Lucinda whispered to me that Musgrave had worked for George Butler before Heidi hired him. Harvey Washburn told me that Musgrave had once been an artist, and that he had only recently moved to Mercury from Earth; this was his first Solday. That didn’t give him much time to be hired by Butler, fired, and then hired by Van Seegeren. But was that of significance?

Late in the day I spoke with one of the police officers handling the case. She was relieved to have the help of Freya Grindavik; Terminator’s police force is small, and often relies on the help of the city’s famous detective for the more difficult cases. The officer gave me a general outline of what they had learned: Lucinda had heard a shout for help, had stepped into the atrium and seen a bloodied figure crawling down the hallway toward the patio. She had screamed and run for help, but only in the hallway was clear vision possible, and she had quickly gotten lost. After that, chaos; everyone at the party had a different tale of confusion.

After that conversation I had nothing more to do, so I got all the sequestered guests coffee and helped pick up some of the broken hail mirrors and passed some time prowling Heidi’s villa, getting down on my hands and knees with the police robots to inspect a stain or two.

When Freya was finished with her interrogations, she promised Heidi and the police that she would see the case to its end—at least provisionally: “I only do this for entertainment,” she told them irritably. “I’ll stay with it as long as it entertains me. And I shall entertain myself with it.”

“That’s all right,” said the police, who had heard this before. “Just so long as you’ll take the case.” Freya nodded, and we left.

The Solday celebration was long since over, the Great Gates were closed, and once again through the dome shone the black sky. I said to Freya. “Did you hear about Musgrave working for Butler? And how he came from Earth just recently?” For you see, once on the scent I am committed to seeing a case solved.

“Please. Nathaniel,” Freya said. “l heard all that and more. Musgrave stole the concept of Harvey Washburn’s first series of paintings; he blackmailed both Butler and our host Heidi to obtain his jobs from them—or so I deduce from their protestations and certain facts concerning their recent questionable merger that I am privy to. And he tried to assault Lucinda, who is engaged to the cook Delaurence—” She let out a long sigh. “Motives are everywhere.”

“It seems this Musgrave was a thoroughly despicable sort,” I said.

“Yes. An habitual blackmailer.”

“Nothing suggests itself to you?”

“No. I don’t know why I agree to solve these things. Here I am committed to this headbashing, and my best clue is something that you suggested.”

“I wasn’t aware that I had suggested anything!”

“There is a fresh perspective to ignorance that can be very helpful.”

“So it is important that Musgrave just arrived from Earth?”

She laughed. “Let’s stop in the Plaza Dubrovnik and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

Almost three weeks passed without a word from Freya, and I began to suspect that she was ignoring the case. Freya has no real sense of right and wrong, you see; she regards her cases as games, to be tossed aside if they prove too taxing. More than once she has cheerfully admitted defeat, and blithely forgotten any promises she may have made. She is not a moral person.

So I dropped by her home near Plaza Dubrovnik one evening, to rouse her from her irresponsible indifference. When she answered the door there were paint smudges on her face and hands.

“Freya,” I scolded her. “How could you take up an entirely new hobby when there is a case to be solved?”

“Generously I allow you entrance after such a false accusation,” she said. “But you will have to eat your words.”

She led me downstairs to her basement laboratory, which extended the entire length and breadth of her villa. There on a big white-topped table lay Heidi Van Seegeren’s Monet, looking like the three—dimensional geologic map of some minerally blessed country.

“What’s this?” I exclaimed. “Why is this here?”

“I believe it is a fake,” she said shortly, returning to a computer console.

“Wait a moment!” I cried. On the table around the painting were rolls of recording chart paper, lab notebooks, and what looked like black-and-white photos of the painting. “What do you mean?”

After tapping at the console she turned to me. “I mean, I believe it’s a fake.”

“But I thought art forgery was extinct. It is too easy to discover a fake.”

“Ha!” She waved a finger at me angrily. “You pick a bad time to say so. It is a common opinion, of course, but not necessarily true.”

I regarded the canvas more closely. “What makes you think this a fake? I thought it was judged a masterpiece of its period.”

“Something you said first caused me to question it,” she said. “You mentioned that the painting seemed to have been created by an artist familiar with the light of Terminator. This seemed true to me, and it caused mc to reflect that one of the classic signs of a fake was anachronistic sensibility—that is to say, the forger injects into his vision of the past some element of his time that is so much a part of his sensibility that he cannot perceive it. Thus the Victorians faked Renaissance faces with a sentimentality that only they could not immediately see.”

“I see.” I nodded sagely. “It did seem that cathedral had been struck with Solday light, didn’t it.”

“Yes. The trouble is, I have been able to find no sign of forgery in the physical properties of the painting.” She shook her head. “And after three weeks of uninterrupted chemical analysis, that is beginning to worry me.”