by Neil Clarke
“You’ve never seen it when the Great Gates are opened,” she said. “That was the whole point in bringing you here today.”
“I see.” Actually I barely saw anything; as Freya had guided me by the arm to the painting I had accidentally looked directly at the incandescent yellow bars of sunlight and brilliant blue afterimages bounced in my sight. I heard rather than saw Harvey Washburn join us. Many blinks later I was able to join the others in devoting my attention to the big canvas.
Well. The Monet positively glowed in the dense, lambent air; it gave off light like a lamp, vibrating with a palpable energy of its own. At the sight of it even I was impressed.
“Yes,” I admitted to Freya and Harvey, “I can see how precisely he placed all those little chunks of color, and I can see how sharp and solid the cathedral is under all that goo, but it’s like Solday, you know, it’s a heightened effect. The result is garish, really; it’s too much.”
“But this is a painting of midday,” Harvey said. “And as you can see, midday can get pretty garish.”
“But this is Terminator! The Grays have put a lot of talc in the air to make it look this way!”
“So what?” Freya demanded impatiently. “Stop thinking so much, Nathaniel. Just look at it. See it. Isn’t it beautiful? Haven’t you felt things look that way sometimes, seeing stone in sunlight?”
“Well . . . ” And, since I am a strictly honest person, if I had said anything at all I would have had to admit that it did have a power about it. It drew the eye; it poured light onto us as surely as the beams of sunlight extending from the gates in the Dawn Wall to the curved side of the clear dome.
“Well?” Freya demanded.
“Well yes,” I said. “Yes I see that cathedral front—I feel it. But there must have been quite a heat wave in old Rouen. It’s as if Monet had seen Terminator on Solday, the painting fits so well with this light.”
“No,” Freya said, but her left eye was squinted, a sign she was thinking.
Harvey said, “We make the conditions of light in Terminator, and so it is an act of the imagination, like this painting. You shouldn’t be surprised if there are similarities: We value this light because the old masters created it on their canvases.”
I shook my head, and indicated the brassy bedlam around us. “No. I believe we made this one up ourselves.”
Freya and Harvey laughed, with the giddiness that Solday inspires.
Suddenly a loud screech came from inside the villa. Freya hurried across the patio into the music room, and I followed her. Both of us, however, had forgotten the arrangements that Heidi made on Soldays to cast the brilliant light throughout her home, and as we ran past the silenced orchestra into a hallway we were blasted by light from a big mirror carefully placed in the villa’s central atrium. Screams still echoed from somewhere inside, but we could only stumble blindly through bright pulsing afterimages, retinal Monets if you will, while unidentified persons bowled into us, and mirrors crashed to the floor. And the atrium was raised, so that occasional steps up in the hallway tripped us.
“Murder!” someone cried. “Murder! There he goes!” And with that a whole group of us were off down the halls like hounds—blind hounds—baying after unknown prey. A figure leaped from behind a mirror glaring white, and Freya and I tackled it just inside the atrium.
When my vision swam back I saw it was George Butler. “What’s going on?” he asked, very politely for a man who had just been jumped on by Freya Grindavik.
“Don’t ask us,” Freya said irritably.
“Murder!” shrieked Lucinda, from the hallway that led from the atrium directly back to the patio. We jumped up and crowded into the hallway. Just beyond a mirror shattered into many pieces lay a man’s body; apparently he had been crawling toward the patio when he collapsed, and one arm and finger extended ahead of him, still pointing to the patio. Freya approached, gingerly turned the body’s head. “It’s that Musgrave fellow,” she said, blinking to clear her sight. “He’s dead, all right. Struck on the head with the mirror there, no doubt.”
Heidi van Seegeren joined us. “What’s going on?”
“That was my question,” George Butler said.
Freya explained the situation to her.
“Call the police,” Heidi said to Lucinda. “And I suppose no one should leave.”
I sighed.
And so crime detection ensnared me once again. I helped Freya by circulating on the patio, calming the shocked and nervous guests. “Um, excuse me, very sorry to inform you, yes, sorry—hard to believe, yes—somebody had it in for the secretary Musgrave, it appears”—all the while watching to see if anyone would jump, or turn pale, or start to run when I told them. Then, of course, I had to lead gently to the idea that everyone had gone from guest to suspect, soon to be questioned by Freya and the police. “No, no, of course you’re not suspected of anything, farthest thing from our minds, it’s just that Freya wants to know if there’s anything you saw that would help,” and so on. Then I had to do the difficult scheduling of Freya’s interviews, at the same time I was supposed to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.
Oh, the watson does the dirty work, all right. No wonder we always look dense when the detective unveils the solutions; we never have the time even to get the facts straight, much less meditate on their meaning. All I got that day were fragments: Lucinda whispered to me that Musgrave had worked for George Butler before Heidi hired him. Harvey Washburn told me that Musgrave had once been an artist, and that he had only recently moved to Mercury from Earth; this was his first Solday. That didn’t give him much time to be hired by Butler, fired, and then hired by Van Seegeren. But was that of significance?
Late in the day I spoke with one of the police officers handling the case. She was relieved to have the help of Freya Grindavik. Terminator’s police force is small, and often relies on the help of the city’s famous detective for the more difficult cases. The officer gave me a general outline of what they had learned: Lucinda had heard a shout for help, had stepped into the atrium and seen a bloodied figure crawling down the hallway toward the patio. She had screamed and run for help, but only in the hallway was clear vision possible, and she had quickly gotten lost. After that, chaos; everyone at the party had a different tale of confusion.
Following that conversation I had nothing more to do, so I got all the sequestered guests coffee, and helped pick up some of the broken hall mirrors, and passed some time prowling Heidi’s villa, getting down on my hands and knees with the police robots to inspect a stain or two.
When Freya was finished with her interrogations, she promised Heidi and the police that she would see the case to its end—at least provisionally: “I only do this for entertainment,” she told them irritably. “I’ll stay with it as long as it entertains me. And I shall entertain myself with it.”
“That’s all right,” said the police, who had heard this before. “Just so long as you’ll take the case.” Freya nodded, and we left.
The Solday celebration was long since over; the Great Gates were closed, and once again through the dome shone the black sky. I said to Freya, “Did you hear about Musgrave working for Butler? And how he came from Earth just recently?” For you see, once on the scent I am committed to seeing a case solved.
“Please, Nathaniel,” Freya said. “I heard all of that and more. Musgrave stole the concept of Harvey Washburn’s first series of paintings, he blackmailed both Butler and our host Heidi to obtain his jobs from them—or so I deduce, from their protestations, and from certain facts concerning their recent questionable merger that I am privy to. And he tried to assault Lucinda, who is engaged to the cook Delaurence—” She let out a long sigh. “Motives are everywhere.”
Bemused, I said, “It seems this Musgrave was a thoroughly despicable sort.”
“Yes. An habitual blackmailer.”
“Nothing suggests itself to you?”
“No. Not only that, but it seems almost every person at the party had a good
alibi for the moment of the murder! Oh, I don’t know why I agree to solve these things. Here I am committed to this head-bashing, and my best clue is something that you suggested.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had suggested anything!”
“There is a fresh perspective to ignorance that can be very helpful.”
“So it is important that Musgrave just arrived from Earth?”
She laughed. “Let’s stop in the Plaza Dubrovnik and get something to eat. I’m starving.”
Almost three weeks passed without a word from Freya, and I began to suspect that she was ignoring the case. Freya has no real sense of right and wrong, you see; she regards her cases as games, to be tossed aside if they prove too taxing. More than once she has cheerfully admitted defeat, and blithely forgotten any promises she may have made. She is not a moral person.
So I dropped by her home near Plaza Dubrovnik one evening, to rouse her from her irresponsible indifference. When she answered the door there were paint smudges on her face and hands.
“Freya,” I scolded her. “How could you take up an entirely new hobby when there is a case to be solved?”
“Generously I allow you entrance after such a false accusation,” she said. “But you will have to eat your words.”
She led me downstairs to her basement laboratory, which extended the entire length and breadth of her villa.
There on a big white-topped table lay Heidi van Seegeren’s Monet, looking like the three-dimensional geologic map of some minerally blessed country.
“What’s this?” I exclaimed. “Why is this here?”
“I believe it is a fake,” she said shortly, returning to a computer console.
“Wait a moment!” I cried. On the table around the painting were rolls of recording chart paper, lab notebooks, and what looked like black-and-white photos of the painting. “What do you mean?”
After tapping at the console she turned to me. “I mean I believe it’s a fake!”
“But I thought art forgery was extinct. It is too easy to discover a fake.”
“Ha!” She waved a finger at me angrily. “You pick a bad time to say so. It is a common opinion, of course, but not necessarily true.”
I regarded the canvas more closely. “What makes you think this a fake? I thought it was judged a masterpiece of its period.”
“Something you said first caused me to question it,” she said. “You mentioned that the painting seemed to have been created by an artist familiar with the light of Terminator. This seemed true to me, and it caused me to reflect that one of the classic signs of a fake was anachronistic sensibility—that is to say, the forger injects into his vision of the past some element of his time that is so much a part of his sensibility that he cannot perceive it. Thus the Victorians faked Renaissance faces with a sentimentality that only they could not immediately see.”
“I see.” I nodded sagely. “It did seem that cathedral had been struck with Solday light, didn’t it?”
“Yes. The trouble is, I have been able to find no sign of forgery in the physical properties of the painting.” She shook her head. “And after three weeks of uninterrupted chemical analysis, that is beginning to worry me.”
“But Freya,” I said, as something occurred to me. “Does all this have a bearing on the Musgrave murder?”
“I think so,” she replied. “And if not, it is certainly more interesting. But I believe it does.”
I nodded. “So what, exactly, have you found?”
She smiled ironically. “You truly want to know? Well. The best test for anachronisms is the polonium 210, radium 226 equilibrium—”
“Please, Freya. No jargon.”
“Jargon!” She raised an eyebrow to scorn me. “There is no such thing. Intelligence is like mold in a Petri dish—as it eats ever deeper into the agar of reality, language has to expand with it to describe what has been digested. Each specialty provides the new vocabulary for its area of feeding, and gets accused of fabricating jargon by those who know no better. I’m surprised to hear such nonsense from you. Or perhaps not.”
“Very well,” I said, hands up. “Still, you must communicate your meaning to me.”
“I shall. First I analyzed the canvas. The material and its weave match the characteristics of the canvas made by the factory outside Paris that provided Monet throughout the painting of the Rouen cathedral series. Both the fabric and the glue appear very old, though there is no precise dating technique for them. And there was no trace of solvents that might have been used to strip paint off a genuine canvas of the period.
“I then turned to the paint. Follow so far?” she asked sharply. “Paint?”
“You may proceed without further sarcasm, unless unable to control yourself.”
“The palette of an artist as famous as Monet has been studied in detail, so that we know he preferred cadmium yellow to chromium yellow or Naples yellow, that he tended to use Prussian blue rather than cobalt blue, and so on.” She tapped the flecks of blue at the base of the cathedral. “Prussian blue.”
“You’ve taken paint off the canvas?”
“How else test it? But I took very small samples, I assure you. Whatever the truth concerning the work, it remains a masterpiece, and I would not mar it. Besides, most of my tests were on the white paint, of which there is a great quantity, as you can see.”
I leaned over to stare more closely at the canvas. “Why the white paint?”
“Because lead white is one of the best dating tools we have. The manufacturing methods used to make it changed frequently around Monet’s time, and each change in method altered the chemical composition of the paint. After 1870, for instance, the cheaper zinc white was used to adulterate lead white, so there should be over one percent zinc in Monet’s lead white.”
“And is that what you found?”
“Yes. The atomic absorption spectrum showed—” She dug around in the pile of chart paper on the table. “Well, take my word for it—”
“I will.”
“Nearly twelve percent. And the silver content for late-nineteenth-century lead white should be around four parts per million, the copper content about sixty parts per million. So it is with this paint. There is no insoluble antimony component, as there would be if the paint had been manufactured after 1940. The X-ray diffraction pattern”—she unrolled a length of chart paper and showed me where three sharp peaks in a row had been penned by the machine—“is exactly right, and there is the proper balance of polonium 210 and radium 226. That’s very important, by the way, because when lead white is manufactured the radioactive balance of some of its elements is upset, and it takes a good three hundred years for them to decay back to equilibrium. And this paint is indeed back to that equilibrium.”
“So the paints are Monet’s,” I concluded. “Doesn’t that prove the work authentic?”
“Perhaps,” Freya admitted. “But as I was doing all this analysis, it occurred to me that a modern forger has just as much information concerning Monet’s palette as I do. With a modern laboratory it would be possible to use such information as a recipe, so to speak, and then to synthesize paints that would match the recipe exactly. Even the radioactively decayed lead white could be arranged, by avoiding the procedures that disrupt the radioactive balance in the first place!”
“Wouldn’t that be terrifically complicated?”
Freya stared at me. “Obviously, Nathaniel, we are dealing with a very, very meticulous faker here. But how else could it be done, in this day and age? Why else do it at all? The complete faker must take care to anticipate every test available, and then in a modern laboratory create the appropriate results for every one of them. It’s admirable!”
“Assuming there ever was such a forger,” I said dubiously. “It seems to me that what you have actually done here is prove the painting genuine.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But even with these paints made by recipe, as you call them, the faker would still have to paint the painti
ng!”
“Exactly. Conceive the painting, and execute it. It becomes very impressive, I confess.” She walked around the table to look at the work from the correct angle. “I do believe this is one of the best of the Rouen cathedral series—astonishing, that a forger would be capable of it.”
“That brings up another matter,” I said. “Doesn’t this work have a five-hundred-year-old pedigree? How could a whole history have been provided for it?”
“Good question. But I believe I have discovered the way. Let’s go upstairs—you interrupted my preparations for lunch, and I’m hungry.”
I followed her to her extensive kitchen, and sat in the window nook that overlooked the tile rooftops of the lower city while she finished chopping up the vegetables for a large salad.
“Do you know the painting’s history?” Freya asked, looking up from a dissected head of lettuce.
I shook my head. “Up until now the thing has not been of overwhelming interest to me.”
“A confession of faulty esthetics. The work was photographed at the original exhibit in 1895, Durand-Ruel photo 5828 L8451. All of the information appended to the photo fits our painting—same name, size, signature location. Then for a century it disappeared. Odd. But it turned out to have been in the estate of an Evans family, in Aylesbury, England. When the family had some conservation work done on one corner it returned to public knowledge, and was photographed for a dozen books of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. After that it slipped back into obscurity, but it is as well documented as any of the series belonging to private estates.”
“Exactly my point,” I said. “How could such a history be forged?”
As Freya mixed the salad she smiled. “I sat and thought about that for quite some time myself. But consider it freshly, Nathaniel. How do we know what we know of the past?”