Kim Robinson - The Planet on the Table

Iam not, despite the appearances, fond of crime detection. In the past, it is true, I occasionally accompanied my friend Freya Grindavik as she solved her cases, and admittedly this watsoning gave me some good material for the little tales I have written for the not-very-discriminating markets on Mars and Titan. But after The Case of the Golden Sphere of the Lion of Mercury, in which I ended up hung by the feet from the clear dome of Terminator, two hundred meters above the rooftops of the city, my native lack of enthusiasm rose to the fore. And following the unfortunate Adventure of the Vulcan Accelerator, when Freya’s arch-foe Jan Johannsen tied us to a pile of hay under a large magnifying glass in a survival tent, there to await Mercury’s fierce dawn. I put my foot down: no more detecting. That, so to speak, was the last straw.

So when I agreed to accompany Freya to the Solday party of Heidi Van Seegeren, it was against my better judgement. But Freya assured me there would be no business involved; and despite the obvious excesses, I enjoy a Solday party as much as the next aesthete. So when she came by my villa, I was ready.

“Make haste,” she said. “We’re late, and I must be before Heidi’s Monet when the Great Gates are opened. I adore that painting.”

“Your infatuation is no secret,” I said, panting as I trailed her through the crowded streets of the city. Freya, as those of you who have read my earlier tales know, is two and a half meters tall, and broad-shouldered: she barged through the shoals of Solday celebrants rather like a whale, and I, pilotfishlike, dodged in her wake. She led me through a group of Greys, who with carpetbeaters were busy pounding rugs saturated with yellow dust. As I coughed and brushed off my fine burgundy suit, I said, “My feeling is that you have taken me to view that antique canvas once or twice too often.”

She looked at me sternly. “As you will see, on Solday it transcends even its usual beauty. You look like a bee drowning in pollen, Nathaniel.”

“Whose fault is that?” I demanded, brushing my suit fastidiously.

We came to the gate in the wail surrounding Van Seegeren’s town villa, and Freya banged on it loudly. The gate was opened by a scowling man. He was nearly a meter shorter than Freya, and had a balding head that bulged rather like the dome of the city. In a mincing voice he said. “Invitations?”

“What’s this?” said Freya. “We have permanent invitations from Heidi”

“I’m sorry,” the man said coolly. ‘Ms. Van Seegeren has decided her Solday parties have gotten overcrowded, and this time she sent out invitations and instructed me to let in only those who have them.”

“Then there has been a mistake,” Freya declared. “Get Heidi on the intercom, and she will instruct you to let me in. I am Freya Grindavik, and this is Nathaniel Sebastian.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said, quite unapologetically. “Every person turned away says the same thing, and Ms. Van Seegeren prefers not to be disturbed so frequently.”

“She’ll be more disturbed to hear we’ve been held up.” Freya shifted toward the man. “Who are you, anyway?”

“I am Sandor Musgrave, Ms. Van Seegeren’s private secretary.”

“How come I’ve never met you?”

“Ms. Van Seegeren hired me two months ago,” Musgrave said, and stepped back so he could look Freya in the eye without straining his neck. “That is immaterial, however—”

“I’ve been Heidi’s friend for over forty years,” Freya said slowly, once again shifting forward to lean over the man. “And I would wager she values her friends more than her secretaries…“

Musgrave stepped back indignantly. “I’m sorry!” be snapped. “I have my orders! Good day!”

But alas for him, Freya was now standing well in the gateway, and she seemed uninclined to move; she merely cocked her head at him Musgrave comprehended his problem, and his mouth twitched uncertainly.

The impasse was broken when Van Seegeren’s maid Lucinda arrived from the Street. “Oh, hello Freya, Nathaniel. What are you doing out here?”

“This new Malvolio of yours is barring our entrance,” Freya said.

“Oh, Musgrave,” said Lucinda. “Let these two in, or the boss will be mad.”

Musgrave retreated with a deep scowl. “I’ve studied the ancients, Ms. Grindavik,” he said sullenly. “You need not insult me.”

“Malvolio was a tragic character,” Freya assured him. “Read Charles Lamb’s essay concerning the matter.”

“I certainly will,” Musgrave said stiffly, and hurried to the villa, giving us a last poisonous look.

“Of course Lamb’s father,” Freya said absently, staring after the man, “was a house servant. Lucinda, who is that?”

Lucinda rolled her eyes. “The boss hired him to restore some of her paintings, and get the records in order. I wish she hadn’t.”

The bell in the gate sounded. “I’ve got it. Musgrave,” Lucinda shouted at the villa. She opened the gate, revealing the artist Harvey Washburn.

“So you do,” said Harvey, blinking. He was high again; a bottle of the White Brother hung from his hand. “Freya! Nathaniel! Happy Solday to you—have a drink?”

We refused the offer, and then followed Harvey around the side of the villa, exchanging a glance. I felt sorry for Harvey. Most of Mercury’s great collectors came to Harvey’s showings, but they dissected his every brushstroke for influences, and told him what he should be painting, and then among themselves they called his work amateurish and unoriginal, and never bought a single canvas. I was never surprised to see him drinking.

We rounded the side of the big villa and stepped onto the white stone patio, which was made of a giant slab of England’s Dover cliffs, cut out and transported to Mercury entire. Malvolio Musgrae had spoken the truth about Heidi reducing the size of her Solday party: where often the patio had been jammed, there were now less than a dozen people. I spotted George Butler, Heidi’s friend and rival art collector, and Arnold Ohman, the art dealer who obtained for many of Mercury’s collectors their ancient masterpieces from Earth. As I greeted them Freya led us all across the patio to the back wall of the villa, which was also fronted with white slabs of the Dover cliffs. There, all alone, hung Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral—Sun Effect . “Look at it, Nathaniel!” Freya commanded me. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I looked at it Now you must understand that, as owner of the Gallery Orientale, and by deepest personal aesthetic conviction, I am a connoisseur of Chinese art, a style in which a dozen artfully spontaneous brushstrokes can serve to delineate a mountain or two, several trees, a small village and its inhabitants, and perhaps some birds. Given my predilection, you will not be surprised to learn that merely to look at the antique rectangle of color that Freya so admired was to risk damaging my eyes. Thick scumbled layers of grainy paint scarcely revealed the cathedral of the title, which wavered under a blast of light so intense that I doubted Mercury’s midday could compete with it. Small blobs of every color served to represent both the indistinct stone and a pebbly sky; both were composed of combinations principally of white, yellow, and purple, though as I say, every other color made an appearance.