Walter Williams - Logs

"Valuable?" Martinez asked. "How valuable?"

"I think he paid something like eighty thousand for it."

Martinez whistled.

"You could probably buy it, my lord, from the captain's estate."

"Not at those prices, I can't."

Jukes shrugged. "It would depend on whether you could get a license for cult art, anyway."

Martinez was startled. "Cult art. That's cult art?"

"The Holy Family with a Cat, by Rembrandt. You wouldn't know it was cultish except for the title."

Martinez considered the painting through his haze of surprise. The cult art he remembered from his visits to the Museum of Superstition, and the other pieces he'd seen on Fletcher's cabin walls, made its subjects look elevated, or grand or noble or at the very least uncannily serene, but the plain-faced mother, the cat, and the child in red pajamas merely looked comfortably middle-class.

"The cat isn't normal with the Holy Family?"

A smile twitched at Jukes' lips. "No. Not the cat."

"Or the frame? The red curtain?"

"That's the contribution of the artist."

"The red pajamas?"

Jukes laughed. "No, that's just to echo the red of the curtain."

"Could the title be in error?"

Jukes shook his head. "Unlikely, my lord, though possible."

"So what makes it cult art?"

"The Holy Family is a fairly common subject, though usually the Virgin's in a blue robe, and the child is usually naked, and there are usually attendants, with some of them, ah-" He reached for a word. "-floating. This particular treatment is unconventional, but then there were no hard and fast rules for this sort of thing-Narayanguru, for example, is usually portrayed on a ayaca tree, I suppose because the green and red blossoms are so attractive, but Captain Fletcher's Narayanguru is mounted on a real tree, and it's a vel-trip, not an ayaca."

A very faint chord echoed in Martinez' mind. He sat up, lifting his head.

"-and Da Vinci, of course, in his Virgin of the Rocks, did a-"

Martinez raised a hand to cut off Jukes' distracting voice. Jukes fell silent, staring at him.

"An ayaca tree," Martinez murmured. Jukes wisely did not answer.

Martinez thought furiously, trying to reach into his own head. Mention of the ayaca tree had set a train of associations cascading through Martinez' mind, and he had reached conclusions; but it had all happened in an instant, without his having to think through a single step. He now had to consciously and carefully work backward from his conclusions through the long process to make certain that it all held together, and to find out where it had started.

Without speaking he rose from his desk and walked to his safe. He opened a tunic button and drew out his captain's key on its elastic, inserted the key into his safe, and pressed the combination. Airtight seals popped as the door swung open, and Martinez caught a whiff of stale air. Martinez took out the clear plastic box in which Doctor Xi had placed Fletcher's jewelry, opened the box, and separated from the signet ring and the silver mesh ring the gold pendant on its chain. He held the chain up to the light, seeing the tree-shaped pendant dangling, emeralds and rubies glittering against the gold.

"An ayaca tree like this?" he asked.

Jukes squinted as he looked at the dangling pendant. "Yes," he said, "that's typical."

"Would you say that this pendant is particularly rare or unusually beautiful or stands out in any way?"

Jukes blinked at him, then frowned. "It's very well made and moderately expensive, but there's nothing extraordinary about it."

Martinez flipped the pendant into his hand and returned to his desk. "Comm," he said, "page Lieutenant Prasad."

A shadow fell across his door, and he looked up to see Marsden, the ship's secretary, with his datapad.

"My lord, if you're busy…"

"No. Come in."

"Lord captain." Chandra's face appeared in the depths of Martinez' desk. "You paged me?"

"I have a question," Martinez said. "Did Captain Fletcher wear a pendant in the shape of a tree?"

Chandra was taken aback. "He did, yes."

"Did he wear it all the time?"

Chandra's look grew more curious. "Yes, so far as I know he did, though he took it off when he, ah, went to bed."

Martinez raised his fist into view of the pickups on the desk, and let the pendant fall from his grasp so that it dangled on the end of its chain.

"This is the pendant?"

Chandra squinted, and her face distorted in the camera pickups as she stared into her sleeve display. "Looks like it, my lord."

"Thank you, lieutenant. End transmission."

Chandra's startled face faded from the display. Martinez looked at the pendant for a long moment as excitement hummed in his nerves, and then became aware of the silence in his office, of Jukes and Marsden staring at him.

"Have a seat for a moment," he said. "This may take a while."

He was still reaching deep into his own head.

He called up a security manual onto his desk display, one intended for the constabulary and Investigative Service. Included was a description of cults and the methods of recognizing them.

Narayanism, Martinez read, a cult based on the teachings of Narayanguru (Balambhoatdada Seth), which were condemned for a belief in a higher plane and for the founder's alleged performance of miracles. Narayanguru's teachings show a kinship to those of the Terran philosopher Schopenhauer, themselves condemned for nihilism. Though cult tradition maintains that Narayanguru was hanged on an ayaca tree, historical records show that he was tortured and executed by more conventional methods in the Year of the Praxis 5581, on Terra. Because of this false tradition, cultists sometimes recognize one another by carrying flowering branches of the ayaca on certain days, planting ayacas about the home, or by using the ayaca blossom on jewelry, pottery, etc. There are also the usual variety of hand and other signals.

Narayanism is not a militant cult and its adherents are not believed to pose an active threat to the Peace of the Praxis, except insofar as they promote false beliefs. The cult has recently been reported on Terra, Preowin, and Sandama, where entire clans sometimes participate secretly in cult activity.

Martinez gazed up at Jukes, and held out the pendant dangling from his fist. "Why would Captain Fletcher wear this pendant?" he asked. "It's not a particularly rare or precious form of art, is it?"

Jukes looked blank. "No, my lord."

"Suppose he was actually a believer," Martinez said. "Suppose he was a genuine Narayanist."

A look of pure horror crossed Marsden's face. Martinez looked at him in surprise. Marsden took a few moments to find words, but when he spoke his voice trembled with what Martinez supposed was fury.

"Captain Fletcher, a cultist?" Marsden said. "Do you realize what you're saying? A member both of the Gombergs and the Fletchers? A Peer of the highest possible pedigree, with noble ancestors stretching back thousands of years…"

Martinez was taken aback by this rant, but was in no mood for a pompous lecture on genealogy. He cut Marsden off in mid-tirade.

"Marsden," he said, "do you know where the personal possessions of Thuc and Kosinic have been stored?"

Marsden larynx moved in his throat as he visibly swallowed his indignation, "Yes, my lord," he said.

"Kindly bring them."

Marsden rose, put the datapad on his seat, and braced. "At once, lord captain."

The secretary marched away, his legs stiff with anger. Jukes looked after him in surprise.

"An odd man," he said. "I had no idea he was such a snob." He turned to Martinez and raised an eyebrow. "Do you really think Captain Fletcher was a cultist?"

Martinez looked at the pendant that still dangled form his hand.

"I don't know why else he'd wear this."