Walter Williams - Conventions of War

“Have you considered interiors?” he asked.

Jukes had. Martinez looked at designs for the office and dining room, both as brazen as the exterior designs, one dominated by verdant jungle green and the other by dark reds and yellows that suggested sandstone cliffs standing over a desert.

“Keep working along these lines,” Martinez said. “And if another theme occurs to you, feel free to work it out. We’ve got a lot of time.” It would be ages beforeIllustrious saw a dock or underwent a refit-the raid into Naxid space would last at least another couple months, and then the Fleet would have to reunite to retake Zanshaa.

There was a whole war betweenIllustrious and any new paint job.

Still, Martinez saw no reason not to plan for a grand triumph and its aftermath, in which he could decorateIllustrious as if it were his private yacht. For the odds were that either he would experience a grand triumph or be blown to atoms, and for his part, he’d rather assume the former.

“I should mention at this point, my lord,” Jukes said, “that Captain Fletcher was paying me sixty zeniths per month.”

“I looked up the captain’s accounts, and he paid you twenty,” Martinez said. “For my part, I propose to pay you fifteen.”

As Martinez spoke, Jukes’s expressions went from smug confidence to chagrin to horror. He stared at Martinez as if he’d just turned into a creature with scales and fangs. Martinez tried not to laugh.

“I don’tneed a personal artist,” he explained. “I’d rather have a rigger first class, but I don’t expect I’ll get one.”

Jukes swallowed hard. “Yes, my lord.”

“And I was thinking,” Martinez said, “that when things become a little less busy, you might begin a portrait.”

“A portrait,” Jukes repeated dully. He didn’t seem to be thinking very well through his shock, because he asked, “Whose portrait, my lord?”

“The portrait of a bold skipper not afraid to stand above the common run of officers,” Martinez said. “I should look romantic and dashing and very much in charge. I shall be carrying the Golden Orb, andCorona andIllustrious should be in the picture too. Any other details I leave to you.”

Jukes blinked several times, as if he’d had to reprogram part of his mind and the blinks were elements of his internal code.

“Very good, my lord,” he said.

Martinez decided he might as well pay Jukes a compliment and take his mind off his misfortunes. “Thank you for changing the pictures in my cabin,” he said. “The view is now a considerable improvement.”

“You’re welcome.” Jukes took a breath and made a visible effort to reengage with the person sitting before him. “Was there a piece you particularly liked? I could locate other works in that style.”

“The one with the woman and the cat,” Martinez said. “Though I don’t think I’ve seen any painting quite in that style anywhere.”

Jukes smiled. “It’s not precisely typical of the painter’s work. That’s a very old Northern European piece.”

Martinez looked at him. “And North Europe is where, exactly?”

“Terra, my lord. The painting dates from before the Shaa conquest. Though I should say theoriginal painting, because this may be a copy. It’s hard to say, because all the documentation is in languages no one speaks anymore, and hardly anyone reads them.”

“Itlooks old enough.”

“It wants cleaning.” Jukes gave a thoughtful pause. “You’ve got a good eye, my lord. Captain Fletcher bought the painting some years ago, but decided he didn’t like it because it didn’t seem one thing or another, and he put it in storage.” His mouth gave a little twitch of disapproval. “I don’t know why he took it to war with him. It’s not as if the painting could be replaced if we got blown up. Maybe he wanted it with him since it was so valuable, I don’t know.”

“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 Museums 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 normally seen with the Holy Family?”

A smile twitched at Jukes’s 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 an 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’s mind. He sat up, lifting his head.

“…and Da Vinci, of course, in hisVirgin of the Rocks, did a-”

Martinez raised a hand to cut off Jukes’s 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 off a train of associations, then conclusions, but in an instant, without him 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. Seals popped as the door swung open, and Martinez caught a whiff of stale air. He took out the clear plastic box in which Dr. Xi had placed Fletcher’s jewelry, opened it and separated the signet ring and the silver mesh ring from the gold pendant on its chain. Holding the chain up to the light, he saw 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-”