by Paul Preuss
“Go ahead, Colonel,” Sylvester said.
Witherspoon gave the signal; Reed manipulated the controls. The robot’s diamond-edge proboscis and claws slashed into the old bunker. Rust and gray dust flew up in a cloud. The robot ate into the bunker, ate around the walls, and when the roof collapsed on top of it, ate through that. It ate into the floor; slab-iron gun mounts and railings went into its maw, and rubber and steel and copper cables, and even the contents of the drains, choked with ancient grease. Soon there was nothing left of the bunker except a cavity in the hillside. The robot ceased working. Behind itself it had deposited neat molten piles—gleaming iron, ruddy copper, baked calcium.
“Excellent,” said Sylvester, handing the binoculars to Witherspoon. “What’s next?”
“We thought possibly, remote control navigation?” the officer suggested.
“Fine. Any problem if I do the controlling?” she asked.
“Our pleasure.” Witherspoon waved Reed over; he handed her the control unit. She studied it a moment, and Gordon leaned his head to hers and judiciously murmured something about forward and back, but by the time he’d finished her fingers were already conjuring with the controls. The robot, a glowing dot in the naked-eye distance, scuttled backward, away from the ex-bunker. It turned and headed downslope, toward them.
She deliberately tried to run it over one of the steep outcrops. At the very edge of the cliff, it refused to go. She would not countermand her order, so the robot took rudimentary thought and found a solution: it began to eat the outcrop away from under itself. Sylvester laughed to see it chew its own switchbacks to the bottom of the cliff.
She ran it at full speed toward their position. It scrambled over the red ground, growing impressively larger as it came, leaving dust and wavering plumes of heat in its wake.
She turned to Witherspoon, her eyes gleaming. “Heat!”
He blinked at her fervor. “Why, yes … we had thought—” He pointed to a long open bunker lying to the north, halfway up the ridge. “Phosphorus,” Witherspoon said. “Close as we could come on short notice. If you’ll just steer the machine in there.”
She bent to the controls again. The robot swerved toward the open bunker. As it rushed close, the bunker suddenly erupted with a glaring white light. Coruscating fountains of whistling, hissing flame leaped high into the air. Without pausing, the robot charged into the midst of the inferno. There it stopped.
It rested there, its own radiators gleaming through the fire. After several long seconds the pyre subsided. At Sylvester’s gentle urging on the controls, the robot turned, quite unperturbed, and climbed straight up to the crest of the ridge. The soldiers stolidly kept their positions as the metal juggernaut rose above the ridge and bore down upon them. When the fiery beetle was a few yards away Sylvester lifted her hands from the control unit. The robot halted, radiant.
“Well done, Colonel,” said Sylvester, handing the controls to Witherspoon. Again she hooked her long hair out of her eyes. “Mr. Gordon, my congratulations to Rolls-Royce.”
When Sylvester reached her hotel that evening the desk clerk informed her that a Mr. Nikos Pavlakis was waiting for her in the lounge. She marched straight in and surprised him hunched over the bar, his big shoulders straining the tight jacket of his suit, a tumbler of water and a shot glass of cloudy ouzo in front of him, deep into what looked like his second bowl of peanuts. She smiled when he mumbled something she took to be an invitation to have a drink.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Pavlakis, but I’ve had a busy day and I’m facing a full evening. If you’d called earlier…”
“Apologies, dear lady”—he choked as he downed a peanut—“on my way to Victoria, unexpected stopover. I thought I would take a minute to catch you up. But some other time…”
“So long as there is no delay in the schedule we discussed, you don’t need to trouble yourself to report to me,” she said. He had a very expressive face; she could have sworn that his mustache drooped, that his hair had just lost some of its curl. Her own expression hardened. “What’s the problem, Mr. Pavlakis?”
“There is no problem, I assure you. We will be ready on time. No problem. Some additional costs we must absorb…”
“There is a problem, then.”
“Our problem, dear lady. Not yours.” He smiled, displaying fine white teeth, but his eyes were not smiling with them.
Sylvester contemplated him. “All right then. If in fact there’s no problem please wire me tomorrow, here at the hotel, reconfirming your intention to begin loading cargo within two weeks, as agreed.” When he nodded glumly she added, “Until then, we won’t need to talk again.”
Pavlakis muttered, “Good night, dear lady,” but she was already marching away.
6
London had not fared as well as Manhattan in the new century; it was as cramped and soot-blackened as ever, as severely Balkanized by differences of accent, skin color, class. In a moment one’s square black taxicab passed from elegant brick townhouses and clever converted carriage houses on quaint mews into steaming, crumbling slums. The weather was as foul as ever, too, with gray-bellied clouds excreting thin drizzle and the occasional riverbottom fog bringing equal parts romance and respiratory disease. Nevertheless Sondra Sylvester liked the place—if not as much as she liked Paris or Florence, which were even less changed from what they had been, still rather better than she liked New York, which was no longer real. Living on Port Hesperus, Sylvester got her fill of artificial luxury ten months out of the year; when she took her annual trip to Earth she wanted the thing itself, the dirt with the polish, the noise with the music, the sour with the sweet.
The taxi stopped in New Bond Street. Sylvester pushed her sliver into the taxi’s meter slot, then opened the door and stepped to the damp pavement; while she waited for the machine to record the transaction she adjusted the line of her silk skirt and pulled her chinchilla coat closer against the clinging fog. The sliver rebounded and the cab’s robot voice said, “Much obliged, m’um.”
She pushed through hungry-looking crowds on the sidewalk and walked briskly into the building, nodding to a rosy-cheeked young staffer at the door who smiled back in recognition. She entered the cramped auction room where the book and manuscript sales were held. She’d been here often, as recently as yesterday afternoon, when she’d come to preview today’s offerings. Up for sale were bits and pieces of two private collections, one of them from the estate of the recently deceased Lord Lancelot Quayle, the other anonymous. The two collections had been broken into a hundred lots—most of them of little interest to Sylvester.
Although she was early the room had begun to fill. She took a folding chair in the middle of the room and sat down to wait. It was like being early to church. There was a little transeptlike wing to her right, difficult to see into from her position; bidders who preferred anonymity often seated themselves there. The oldest booksellers, Magg’s, Blackwell’s, Quaritch, the rest, were already at their traditional places around the table in front of the podium. The first rows of folding chairs had been grabbed by outlandishly dressed viddie people whose demeanor was less than dignified. All that preening and squawking! Surely they would be asked to leave if they continued making so much noise…
Two items drew the entertainers and the rest of the unusually large crowd. One of them was a distinct oddity. As a result of Lord Quayle’s lifelong Romish mania, his library had tossed up, among the miscellany, what purported to be an eyewitness account—scrawled in squid ink on fragmented parchment in execrable Greek by a fellow named Flavius Peticius, an undereducated, obviously gullible Roman centurion (or perhaps written by his nearly illiterate scribe)—of the crucifixion of one Joshua of Nazareth and two other malefactors outside the Jerusalem wall, early in the first century A.D.
Here was spectacle, the very stuff of epic! Not to mention timely publicity—and this is what drew the movie folk—for the BBC had recently mounted a lavish production of Desiree Gilfoley’s “While Rome Burns,”
featuring the lissome former model, Lady Adastra Malypense, in an acting debut made memorable by the fact that in only one of her many scenes had Lady Malypense appeared wearing any clothes at all, and those in the Egyptian mode of pleated linen, which is to say transparent. Perhaps Lady Malypense herself was among the noise-makers in the front row; Sylvester would not have recognized her, clothed or otherwise.
As far as Sylvester was concerned they could have been auctioning a piece of the True Cross—so much for the intrinsic value of the parchment. Sonya Sylvester and most of the serious collectors had been attracted by lot 61, a single, thick volume; ironically, had its text not formed the basis of a classic British film of the previous century, the news media might have overlooked it, which Sylvester would have preferred.
She had inspected it yesterday on the plain bookshelf behind the podium, where it was guarded by burly porters in their dust coats and discreetly watched over by the business-suited young men and women of the staff. The book rested open to reveal a scrap of paper lying on its title page, written in an irregular vertical hand: “To Jonathan…”
Using this pseudonymous address, the last of the truly great, truly mad English adventurers—who was also the first of the great, mad philosophers of modern war—had conveyed his book into the hands of a close friend. Who could trace its travels since? Not Sotheby’s.
Valuable books—fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one’s point of view—had never been as valuable as, for example, valuable paintings. Even the rarest printed book was understood to be one of a set of duplicates, not a unique original. Conversely, the rarest painting, while unique, could easily be reproduced in a hundred billion copies, its likeness distributed throughout the inhabited worlds in hardcopy texts and magazines and stored electronic images, thus becoming widely known—while no book, rare or common, could be so casually copied or so casually apprehended. Printed books were not unique, thus subtracting from their value. But printed books could not be easily reproduced, thus subtracting from their fame—and so again subtracting from their speculative market value.
Rarely there came upon the auction block a book both famous and unique. Lot 61 was such a book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in its first, private, and very limited edition—different from subsequent editions not only in its printing and binding but by almost a third of its text. Before today’s auction only one copy had been known to exist, all others having disappeared or been destroyed; the survivor resided in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Not even the Gutenberg Bible could combine fame with such rarity; this was the only available original copy of an acknowledged masterwork of 20th century literature.
Sylvester’s hopes of acquiring the book were not unreasonable, although every major collector and library on this and the colonized planets would be represented at the sale. Quaritch would be acting for the University of Texas, who were surely frantic to add this missing and most precious piece to their extensive collection of the author’s works and memorabilia. Sotheby’s staff held orders from other bidders, and some of them flanking the auctioneer’s podium already had their heads cocked to the phone-links in their ears, receiving last minute instructions from far places. But all the bidders would have their top limits, and Sylvester’s was very high.
Promptly at eleven the auctioneer stepped to the podium. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Sotheby and Company.” He was a tall man, striving to overcome the East End and to achieve Oxbridge in his speech and demeanor, and he got the sale moving without delay. Although there were flurries of interest over 16th century English translations of Caesar’s Commentaries and Plutarch’s Lives, most of Quayle’s library was disposed of rapidly.
Then the crucifixion parchment came up, and the mediahounds zeroed in with their photogram cameras. The viddie denizens of the front row cooed and fluttered. Sure enough, someone addressed the blond woman who made the first bid as “Adastra, darling,” in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard at the back of the room. After a few quick rounds only Lady Malypense and two other serious bidders remained. A Sotheby’s staffer was representing one of them, and Sylvester suspected that the bidder was Harvard, perhaps hoping to acquire a crucifixion account to match the one Yale already possessed. The third bidder was behind her, a man with the accent of an Alabama preacher. It became a two-way contest when Harvard dropped out; the Southern churchman was implacable.
At last Lady Malypense failed to respond to the last “do I hear…?” As if the gavel were a cue, the actress and her claque abruptly marched out, looking daggers at the portly victor.
The anonymous collection, “the property of a gentleman,” was now offered in lots. Most were items of military history, in which Sylvester took no special interest; her field was early 20th century literature, particularly English—that is, British.
Eventually lot 60, a first edition account of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s exploits during the Cretan resistance of World War II, went under the gavel. Sylvester would have liked to have had that book, and she bid on it—not that she cared about Crete or a half-forgotten war, but Leigh Fermor was a fine describer of places—but its price rose swiftly higher than she was willing to go. Soon the auctioneer said “sold” and the room immediately fell silent.
“Lot 61. Lawrence, T. E., The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”—as the director spoke, a solemn young man bore the heavy book forward and held it aloft, turning it slowly from side to side. “Printed in linotype on Bible paper, recto only, double columns. Bound in full tan morocco, edges gilt, in marbled slipcase. Inserted loose in the front, two leaves, handwritten, one a note in dedication ‘to Jonathan’ and signed by the author ‘at Farnborough, 18 November 1922,’ the other being comments written in pencil, in a hand thought to be that of Robert Graves. This very rare book is one of eight printed by the Oxford Times Press in 1922 at the author’s behest, three of which were destroyed by him, and three others presumed lost. The reserve is five hundred thousand pounds.”
He had hardly concluded his description when the bidding commenced. A little rustle of excitement rippled through the room as the auctioneer recited increasingly greater numbers, almost without pausing: “Six hundred thousand, I am bid six hundred thousand … six hundred and fifty thousand … seven hundred thousand.” No one spoke, but fingers were flickering and heads were nodding, at the dealers’ table and elsewhere in the room, so rapidly that the auctioneer did not even have time to acknowledge those who had made the bids.
“Eight hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds,” said the auctioneer. For the first time there was a momentary pause before he got a response. It was clear that many bidders were approaching their limits. By the rules of the game, the higher the price, the higher the minimum advance; the price was now so high that the minimum advance was five thousand pounds. “Am I bid eight hundred and eighty thousand pounds?” the auctioneer asked matter-of-factly.
Quaritch and a single other bookseller responded. The auctioneer’s gaze flickered to the transept on his left; evidently whoever was seated there, out of sight, had also bid.
“Am I bid eight hundred and eighty-five thousand?”
“Nine hundred thousand pounds,” Sondra Sylvester said, speaking for the first time. Her voice in the crowded room was new, rich, darkly colored, a voice—it was obvious to everyone—accustomed to giving orders. The auctioneer nodded at her, smiling in recognition.
At the front table the gentleman from Quaritch, who was in fact representing the University of Texas, seemed unperturbed—the humanities department of Texas had an extensive Lawrence collection and was no doubt prepared to go to extreme lengths to acquire the prize—but the remaining rival bookseller leaned back in resignation, dropping his pencil.
“I am bid nine hundred thousand pounds. Am I bid nine hundred and five?” The auctioneer glanced to his left once, twice, then announced, “One million pounds.”
An appreciative groan rumbled through the audience. The man from Quaritch glanced curiously over his shoulde
r, made a note on the pad in front of him—and declined to bid further, having reached his client’s top. The minimum advance was now ten thousand pounds.
“One million ten thousand pounds,” Sylvester said. She sounded confident, more confident than in fact she felt. Who was in the transept? Who was bidding against her?
The auctioneer nodded. “I am bid…” He hesitated as he glanced to his left, then momentarily fixed his gaze there. He turned to look straight at Sondra Sylvester and almost shyly indicated the transept with a spasm of his hand. “I am bid one million, five hundred thousand pounds,” he said, his voice carrying to her with peculiar intimacy.
A collective hiss whiffled through the audience. Sylvester felt her face grow stiff and cold. For a moment she did not move, but there was little point in calculating her resources; she was soundly beaten.
“I am bid one million and five hundred thousand. Am I bid one million five hundred thousand and ten?” The auctioneer was still looking at her. Still she did not move. He averted his gaze then, politely, looking without seeing into the bright eyes of his delighted audience. “I am bid one million five hundred thousand.” The gavel hovered over the block. “For the last time… I have a bid of one million five hundred thousand.” The gavel descended. “Sold.”
The audience burst into applause, spiced with little cries of delight. Who was being applauded, Sylvester wondered bitterly—a deceased author, or a spendthrift acquisitor?
Porters ceremoniously removed the printed relic from public view. A few people leaped up, scuttling for the door as the auctioneer cleared his throat and announced. “Lot 62, miscellaneous autographs…”
Sylvester sat where she was, not moving, feeling the eyes of the curious burning into her. In the depths of her disappointment she was curious, too, to know who had outbid her. She rose slowly and moved as quietly as she could toward the aisle. Inching toward the transept wing, standing beside it, waiting there patiently as the sale continued … more and more people leaving throughout the final routine minutes … and then it was over. Sylvester stepped in front of the transept wing.