by Scott Azmus
Long before Vietnam.
“This is incredible,” Danny says. “This might sound stupid, but the color really surprises me. I’ve seen a lot of old TV shows and—”
“You were expecting black and white?”
He blushes, shrugs, and we both turn back to the hologram. After the marbles, came World War II.
Before that, I mean. Between 1945 and 1941, the jar repeatedly fills with all manner of small recyclables my father would have taken down to help the war effort, him being a touch too old to serve.
The image jerks, fades . . . returns. “What’s wrong?” I ask.
“This is useless for archeology! See, the years are accelerating. The farther back the time scan runs, the more degraded the resolution. It must have something to do with the photon density. Or maybe I’ve got the resonance polarity skewed.”
I don’t understand what he’s saying, but the years are just shooting past us now. From 1938 back to somewhere close to thirty-three, the image remains dark.
Suddenly: an interval of flashing gold light.
I see a network of cottony strands, minute tangles of gray, and tiny black things, crawling. Spiders? Somewhere in the old barn? The daily passage of a sunbeam?
Digits blur. The jar swirls as the years stream farther back….
Snap! Just like that, the jar is full. In the brief reflections, I recognize my mother’s description of the old family store. The jar empties itself of red-beet eggs, then pickles, then—
“What the heck are those?”
“Pig’s feet.” Grand-dad loved them with lentils and greens.
The jar darkens, then immediately glows. Its ribbed sides reflect hundreds of other jars.
“See,” Danny says, “it’s not so valuable. This must be where they were manufactured. One of thousands.”
The image breaks up, but before Danny switches off I imagine seeing a beach and after that, mountains.
“Useless, piece-of-crap equipment,” he says, as he yanks a cable free and clears the projection. “End regression. Save.”
I lift Pashtran and absently plop her back in the chair as I stand. I have not thought of many of those things for some time. Grandpa’s store, Dad’s carpentry, Robbie’s marbles. . . . I find myself a bit shaken.
Danny thrusts the laptop into his satchel. “Sorry, Grandma. Thought I had it figured out.”
I hug my grandson. “You will. I know you will.”
He looks at me strangely. I can tell he’s wondering if he should ask about my teary eyes. I don’t give him a chance. I lift the jar from between the colanders and, as I carry it back to the house, embrace it, too.
Right now, it’s in my front window. I’m filling it with the blossoms of spring.
Preface: Starphires
This is my first published story. It brought in something like $.02 per word, but I remember being quite thrilled upon receiving a rare acceptance letter. The editor of Space and Time Magazine, Gordon Linzer, really liked this scary narrative but I don’t think he would have purchased the story’s first serial rights if I hadn’t written it in such a strange point of view.
And I wouldn’t have chosen the “second person POV” if a friend hadn’t explained that it was completely impossible to write any story in second person. Challenge accepted!
Starphires
Your pupils contract and your eyes water. You’ve never seen anything so white. So intensely white. Not even the spotlighted glare of the snow outside. You cast the dagger shard of freshly exposed human bone into the specimen pan. The sharp clang jolts a curse from Odette. You turn, meaning to question her, but the luminous warmth of the starphire grasps and holds your attention.
It glitters and flares at the focus of a dozen microwafer spotlights. You bend to its classic, beaded-raindrop profile and gaze into its scarlet depths. A whirl of flaming beauty flashes out at you. You swallow hard. Mongus Consolidated’s advertisements are not exaggerated. By comparison, even the finest rubies, sapphires, and emeralds look no more valuable than cut glass.
You break your gaze and peer out the grimy, frost-etched window. No change. The onshore wind still rakes the snow horizontally across Manipura. You turn away.
Publicity shots of Mongus’ north latitude mining camp flaunt beautiful taiga and lush undergrowth. It’s not there anymore. Any of it. Something killed—obliterated nearly beyond detection—every living thing within 3.2 klicks of camp center. Only a scattering of naked boulders, the occasional ice gully and a picketing of microlaser towers breaks the resulting desolation.
The proximity of such ugliness to the starphire’s beauty sickens you.
Odette and the mine manager, Verbeck, are the only two survivors. You have yet to meet Verbeck, but Odette doesn’t look like much of a threat. Her auburn hair is clipped short and her austere jacket is snapped right up to her chin. Her eyes are red rimmed and her skin pale.
“Where the hell’s Verbeck?” you ask.
She doesn’t look up. “Probably still crying over the loss of all of his precious gemstones.”
You nod sympathetically. The starphires should have been yours. You’re a thief. A very good thief. And you’d planned this heist for over two years. You yank her chair around and study her weather-creased cheeks and corrugated brow. “Mongus doesn’t employ biotechs; why are you here?”
She looks honestly puzzled. “I’m not sure, Inspector.”
You freeze, but then force your fingers to release the chair. Appropriated uniforms are an unbelievable pain in the ass. “Roanne,” you remind her as you casually kick your field and climbing packs under a table. “Call me Roanne.”
She barely nods. “The camp geologist urgently requested a xeno- or an entomologist. I was probably the closest thing around. I’m a science teacher.”
Jeeze. You lace your fingers and chew the nearest knuckle. “Where were you during the attack?”
“In Verbeck’s star yacht. Having dinner. He wanted me to fix his autopilot.”
“Did you?”
“Would he still be here if I had? If it weren’t for that and the cargo he’s stuffing his holds with, he would have lifted along with the relief ship.”
The prefab’s inner door pivots. Cold air snakes through the room. Verbeck is a large man with thick pink lips and a smooth forehead. His remarkably feminine nose is almost lost in the scaly folds of darkness that cup his eyeballs. He flaps his heater suit’s outer parka as if trying to gulp heat. He struts past you and beams a smile at the spotlighted jewel.
You cringe at his unguarded greed. You hope you hadn’t looked like that earlier. Your cheeks burn as his manicured nails caress the jewel’s lustrous surface like a lover’s hardened nipple. After one more lingering glide, he finally notices you. He looks you up and down.
“My, my, my. Aren’t you a pretty little thing?” He slicks back his oiled hair, offers his hand and grabs your fingers so you can’t get a grip. Your loathing grows as his grasp thaws to a cold clamminess. “Verbeck’s the name, Hugh Verbeck. Mongus Consolidated.”
You retrieve your hand and ask, “General staff?” even though you don’t have to. He’s obviously even less at home here than you are. His suit, check that—his undershorts—probably cost more than you earn on even the best operation.
“You bet. Business first. Name?”
You glance at his Cyber Security II voice analyzer and thank God you used your own name. The Tescada has your reservation fee, but no sense testing their limits. “Roanne Dresden.”
He barely checks the telltales before slipping the analyzer into an inner pocket. “How goes the investigation?”
“Not as well as I’d like,” you say while wondering what the actual inspector might have said. You hadn’t planned on putting too much effort into maintaining the cover. You certainly never planned on doing her job. You’d come to steal the most valuable gemstones in the universe … and walked into this. For a heartbeat, you wonder if the Tescada has set you up. You shrug the possibility aside. You
r contacts would have warned you if the “organization” had finally endorsed your termination.
You chew a knuckle. “I’ll need a vehicle—”
The folds around his eyes twitch. “There are none.”
Odette steps into the doorway. “What about the pit crawlers?”
Verbeck waves toward the mining pit. “Booby trapped. Once a vehicle enters the pit it never comes out. It would be too hard to search every conceivable hiding place for stolen starphires.”
Odette’s gaze hardens. “She could use your yacht—”
“Not on your life.”
“What if there’s another raid?”
Verbeck’s tone softens like he’s explaining something to a dog. “It’s grounded until I have loaded all the remaining stones. End of subject. As I always say, business first.”
Odette rolls her eyes and walks out. You get the idea you’ll soon tire of that phrase yourself.
Verbeck leers at her retreating backside. “Don’t get upset. Whoever did this is long gone.”
You shake your head. “Why are you so certain this was an outside job?”
His laugh comes out in a series of dry snorts. “It was fast. Our security system gave no warning. Had to be an off planet raid.” He lifts his chin as if daring you to contradict him.
You aren’t about to. You draw a knuckle under your overbite. Any Tescada assignment is a gamble, but you’d never considered the possibility that someone would beat you to the punch. Not after the expense of a regional exclusionary guarantee. Now you have no choice but to hunt down the thief. The irony does not escape you.
Verbeck clears his throat and you break your gaze from the starphire. You wonder how long you’ve been staring. You’ve never seeing anything so breath taking. You want it and somehow, you sense, it wants you too.
“Where do you store the intact stones?” you ask.
He sizes you up once again and turns. His keys flash and you follow him into the adjoining security room. He steps to a large flat panel display. At his tersely worded bidding the image shifts from his yacht’s loading to the interior of a brightly illuminated storage shed. Bins and broad sorting tables stand in rigid geometric precision. The place employed a hundred and six people. It is empty.
The image pans right. “This is our central storage and grading facility. After the attack, we found several dozen blues littering the floor. In fact,” he snorts an abbreviated laugh, “more than our own inventory said we had. Blues are much less valuable than other varieties, but I would have taken them anyway. If I were a thief.”
You nod without comment. You wouldn’t have bothered with the less valuable stones. Priorities. Whoever did this was no amateur.
The rough, watery stones barely arouse your interest, but when the imager pans to the greens you can’t look away. They are a deeper and purer green than even the finest Terran emeralds.
From Odette’s makeshift lab, the hiss and gurgle of cutting water jets jar your natural wariness back into play. “Reds are the most valuable?” you ask. You know they are. Who doesn’t? But you don’t want there to be any doubt as to your apparent disinterest. And you need answers.
“Correct. Intact stones range in color, in order of abundance, from dark blue, blue, and green, to yellow, orange, orange-red, and red.” He raises a perfectly manicured nail as a dull, cycling rasp replaces the watery gurgle. When it stops, he smiles apologetically and continues. “Rarity of color determines relative market value.”
“When did you begin finding intact stones?”
His brow furrows. “Two winters ago. Continued pit expansion would have forced us to tear down some of our most important buildings, so we started cutting drifts—”
“Drifts?” Your pre-operation intelligence brief neglected the term.
He tabs an inset entry panel. The screen flashes maps and security diagrams before splitting to reveal a detailed rock cutting plan and a real-time image of the pit. He raps a heavily ringed finger against the cutting plan. “Lateral tunnels. We cut into the south-east end of the pit and started coming across partially abraded stones almost immediately. The first intact stones started coming up shortly thereafter. The surrounding minerals are not in the expected associations yet, but we think we’re getting close to the primary deposit.”
“What’s your production?”
He flashes an apologetic grimace. “Our production remains relatively constant and the last survey gave no estimate of potential reserve.”
The company line. Oh well, had to try. You check the pit’s image. The snow is thinning enough for you to see down into the mining pit. Something is wrong. “I thought the central pit was nearly half a klick deep.”
He smiles proudly while indicating a large pipe at the pit’s seaward end. “It is. The barrier dam holds the sea out, but in winter we flood the pit to whatever level we want. It freezes unbelievably fast and remains as a miner’s platform. We can work the pit face at any desired elevation…increase it all winter long. At spring thaw we pump out the melt and work the pit bottom.”
“Ingenious,” you say while favoring him with a, “you’re so clever,” smile. A heavy steam plume angles up from the pipe. You tap the screen. “What’s that?”
“We use waste heat from the processing plant to protect the inner inlet valves from freezing. The seaward valves are always open. We planned to keep the pipe dry, but that might encourage trespassers. The microlasers now target it extra heavily, in case you’re wondering about using it to enter the pit.”
You tense before realizing that he was talking about anybody using it. Not a trusted security inspector. Not you. Adrenaline surges anyway. “I’m quite aware of what your security system has targeted. I assume you adjusted your security monitors after installing the conduit?”
“Of course. Business first.”
You fight back a knowing grin. Verbeck isn’t an especially good liar.
The cutting shriek of a laser pulls you both around. “What the hell—” Verbeck begins. “Come on!”
“Right,” you answer, but pause just long enough to call up the security supervisory program. Your best practice time is three and a half seconds. This time you take the whole damn thing off-line in just under two. And you’re right behind Verbeck when he turns the corner to Odette’s lab. His bellow is a cross between agony and rage.
You uncover your ears to hear a growled, “What. The Hell. Are You Doing?”
You duck under the sweep of his waving arms. Odette has been busy. Clipped to the depressed stage of a petrographic microscope are the remains of Verbeck’s prized starphire. Several pink slices orbit one another on a loaded grinding scaife. Several more flash under the pulsed beam of a laser polisher.
Verbeck stares at the pinioned gem. “What have you done? That’s worth billions.”
He’s right. Your heart chills. Your stomach sours and you wonder how Verbeck is managing not to murder Odette.
“Billions…,” he says again, weakly. Real tears brim his eyes.
Odette expands her note slab’s hovering display. “Not anymore. Not if these figures are correct.” She lifts her chin at a stack of crystalline wafers. Twin microscopes stand ready for use alongside. “I’ve cut and polished several thin sections, starphire and local granite. Take a look.”
Verbeck looks anything but interested, so you bend to peer where directed. Clouds of black dots opaque large areas, but the overall brilliance of the stone is still magnificent. In all the explored universe, there is little of greater value. “No wonder you never faceted this one,” you say. “It’s full of flaws.”
Verbeck shoulders you aside to stare into the paired eyepieces. “Those aren’t flaws,” he says. “They’re ‘identifying features.’ All gemstones have them.”
You focus the second microscope. The view is not nearly as impressive. Not even close. You say as much.
“That’s the granite thin section. Here.” Odette flicks something into place between the polished section and the eyepiec
es. A network of interlocking crystal color snaps into view. “Polarization reveals characteristic interference patterns and helps identify constituent minerals. The clear areas are quartz. Crosshatched areas are feldspar. The brightly colored regions are mica.”
She hefts the late geologist’s note slab. “He was working with this same setup the day he dragged me into this mess.” She changes slide plates and rotates a more powerful objective into place. “Look at the starphire section again.”
You twist the indicated dial, look and nearly pull back. No matter where you direct the focus, tiny ruffle-edged circles swim into view. There are more every second. They are multiplying and the slice seems paler, less red—more orange, than it had earlier. An opaque starphire would be worthless. Not something you want to see. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. I’m not exactly an expert. I haven’t used an optical ‘scope, especially without a computer diagnostic, in ages.”
Verbeck unclips the slide and reverently transfers the starphire slice to the desk’s blotter. “Doesn’t mean a thing.”
Odette cleans an eyepiece. “The dark regions are expanding. In a few more hours, this stone will be barely translucent. Soon after, opaque as mine slag. These intact stones may be worthless.”
Verbeck jerks a gem case from his vest and rolls out a wad of intricately folded envelopes. Odette stares as he pours out a handful of brilliantly faceted reds and scatters them across the desk top.
You almost forget to breathe.
“These,” he says, “will never be worthless.”
Odette’s hands clench at her sides. “Those are just cut fragments. I’d like to order a few tests. Spectroscopic examination, microprobe analysis—”
“No.” Verbeck’s hand chops the air. His eyes come to a sharply hostile focus. “Business first. With such a large shipment stolen, the threat of irresponsible trading is greater than ever. No telling when the thieves will flood the market. I won’t allow you to heighten public concern. No new testing. Customer confidence takes priority.”