Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

“Yes,” I said.

“We tried to be careful. But one can never be certain about the lengths to which these fanatics will go.”

“I know. You’re absolutely right, Excellency.”

“Be assured, Chase, that we know who is behind this, and we are in the process of seeing to it that they will harm no one else.”

“Yes. Good. I’ve no sympathy for them.”

“As you should not.” He was in a leather chair, wearing black slacks and a white pullover. A gold chain hung around his neck, and he wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist. He looked quite dashing. “But I’m pleased to discover that your injuries are superficial.”

“Thank you.”

“I was worried.”

It occurred to me I hadn’t inquired about him. “You look well, Highness. I assume you were not harmed?”

“No. Thank you. I came away untouched.” The wall behind him was filled with books. “I wanted to extend an invitation to you and to Alex to visit Korrim Mas as my guests. We have excellent accommodations, and I can assure you that you would find it an enthralling experience.”

Okay. I know what you’re thinking. That I was sitting there making nice with a guy who does mass executions and runs torture chambers. But he’d been polite to me, so I found it impossible to say what I really thought. I told him I appreciated the offer, but that I was soon to be married, and that I was unfortunately quite busy. I considered suggesting that, after the ceremony, my husband and I would be delighted to accept his kind offer, but it occurred to me he might say yes, by all means, let’s have both of you to my mountain retreat.

“May I ask whether the fortunate man is Alexander?”

“No,” I said. “My fiance is a person I’ve known for a long time.”

“Excellent.”

“He’s a good man.” Dumb.

“Well, Chase,” he said, “please accept my best wishes for a long and happy future. And congratulate the lucky groom for me.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“I’ll arrange to extend the invitation again, perhaps when life settles down a bit.”

Rainbow had some decisions to make. We’d taken orders from nine clients and come away with a total of nine artifacts. If that sounds like good planning, it wasn’t. Two, the command jacket and the glass, were reserved for the office. Of the remaining seven, Nancy White’s gold bracelet would go to Harold Estavez. Maddy’s blouse was headed for Marcia Cable, a longtime and valued client. And her jumpsuit was earmarked for Ida. Vlad Korinsky, a philosophy professor at Korchnoi University, would get the plaque, with its history of prior missions. Maddy’s etui and its assorted contents would go to Diane Gold. That left only Urquhart’s Bible and the vest to be divided among the four remaining aspirants.

“We have an obligation to keep our commitments,” I told Alex. “You have enough for everybody. Forget about keeping stuff ourselves.”

“I like the idea of having some of it in the office,” he said. “Reminds us what we’re about.”

“Of course it does. But that’s not the point.”

I could see he was not going to be moved. “There’s really no compelling reason to give it up, Chase. Everybody knows what happened. We have forty messages telling us our clients are glad we walked away okay. Nobody even knows, except a couple of people at Survey, that any of the artifacts survived.” He was sitting by the window, drinking something that reflected the sunlight. “So that’ll be the reason we have to disappoint a couple of them. They’ll get over it. Hell, they’ll appreciate the fact that we were almost killed trying to fill the order. We’ve already taken care of five of them. It seems to me it’s easy enough to assign the Bible and the vest, and call the two who are left to pass along our apologies. Couldn’t possibly have foreseen anything like this, terrible waste of excellent merchandise, thanks for your interest, sorry we couldn’t oblige, maybe next time, et cetera.”

“And what happens the next time they call the office and see Maddy’s jacket framed on the wall? Or the glass?”

“That’s simple enough. We’ll put them both out of visual range.”

“Isn’t that defeating the purpose of having them here?”

He cleared his throat. “We’re just determined to throw up roadblocks this morning, aren’t we?”

After we decided how the artifacts would be distributed, he made the calls himself to the two who weren’t getting anything. I’ll give him that. I’ve worked for people who wouldn’t have hesitated to saddle the help with delivering the bad news.

He called from the living room, seated on his sofa, the view of the Melony behind him. (He traditionally did things that way. I called from the office; he called from the sofa.) And he was good. He described the carnage, how horrified he’d been, how unfortunate that so much had been lost. He phrased everything carefully and told the truth, more or less. (Because he knew that eventually the truth would come out.) He’d managed to rescue a handful of objects, but unfortunately not the one he’d earmarked for the client, blah, blah, blah. He hoped next time that we’d all be more fortunate.

And he would, of course, find a way to make it up.

It’s okay, Alex, both clients said. Not to worry. I know how these things can be.

Thanks for trying.

When he’d finished he flashed a satisfied smile at me. I told him I was embarrassed for him. That earned another grin, and he turned the pleasant task of notifying the successful aspirants over to me.

I called each, described the event, and showed the prizes to their new owners, the captain’s vest to a laughing Paul Calder, the plaque to a stoic but obviously delighted Vlad Korinsky.

The vest was accompanied by a mounted picture of Maddy wearing it. Calder raised a fist in triumph. He’d wanted to pilot interstellars, but he suffered from defective color vision and could never qualify. It’s a foolish requirement, actually, because corrective action can be taken, but the rules say your eyes have to meet the standards on their own.

Diane Gold beamed when I showed her the etui. We couldn’t have done better, she said. Gold was an architect, an extraordinarily beautiful woman, but one with whom I suspect no man would want to live. She gave a lot of directions, always knew a better way to get things done, and started wearing on you five minutes after she walked in. She was personally angry with the bombers, who might have destroyed her etui and, incidentally, could have killed me. “Death’s too good for them,” she said.

The Bible went to Soon Lee, a book collector and a wealthy widow who lived on Diamond Island. Marcia Cable wasn’t home when I called, but she got back to me, breathless, within the hour.

“You got a uniform blouse,” I told her. “Maddy’s.”

I thought she was going to collapse.

The most melancholy moment came when I showed Ida Patrick the jumpsuit.

She listened and swayed a little and asked what else had been in the exhibition.

“Glasses and books,” I said. “Flatware and jackets. There were two other jumpsuits.”

“Whose?” she asked.

“Urquhart’s and Mendoza’s.”

I could almost feel her physical presence in the room. The color drained from her face, and I thought for a moment she might be having a heart attack. “And they were destroyed in the bombing?”

“Yes.”

“Barbarians,” she hissed. “Don’t have enough common decency to do the assassination responsibly. I don’t know what the world’s coming to, Chase.”

In its own way, each of the artifacts was intriguing, and I enjoyed having a chance to spend time with them while preparing them for shipment to their new owners. The one that was most fascinating was Garth Urquhart’s Bible. It had gold trim, was wellworn, and it pages were filled with notes that were sometimes mournful and invariably incisive. Urquhart, whose public persona had suggested a relentlessly optimistic man, showed some doubts about where we were going. In Genesis, beside the passage, “Be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein,” he commented: We’ve done that. Resources soon will start to become scarce. But it’s okay. At the moment we have what we need. Our children, however, may be another matter.