Year's Best SF 17

“If you are to come here, you must never break anything,” he said.

“I won’t touch,” Thorn said.

“No, that’s not what I meant. One must touch things, and hold them, and work them. Mere looking is never enough. But touch them as they wish to be touched.” He handed her the ammonite fossil. Its curve fit perfectly in her hand. The face looked surprised when she held it up before her, and she laughed.

Most of the walls were as crowded as the floor, with paintings hung against overlapping tapestries and guidons. But one wall was empty except for a painting that hung alone, as if in a place of honor. As Thorn walked toward it, it seemed to shift and change colors with every change of angle. It showed a young girl with long black hair and a serious expression, about Thorn’s age but far more beautiful and fragile.

Seeing where she was looking, Magister Pregaldin said, “The portrait is made of butterfly wings. It is a type of artwork from Vindahar.”

“Is that the home world of the Vind?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“Yes,” he said hesitantly. “But it would mean nothing to you. She died a long time ago.”

There was something in his voice—was it pain? No, Thorn decided, something less acute, like the memory of pain. It lay in the air after he stopped speaking, till even he heard it.

“That is enough art history for today,” he said briskly. “We were speaking of airplanes.”

That afternote, Hunter was out on one of his inscrutable errands. Thorn waited till Maya was talking to one of her friends and crept up to Hunter’s office. He had a better library than anyone she had ever met, a necessary thing on this planet where there were almost no public sources of knowledge. Thorn was quite certain she had seen some art books in his collection. She scanned the shelves of disks and finally took down one that looked like an art encyclopedia. She inserted it into the reader and typed in “butterfly” and “Vindahar.”

There was a short article from which she learned that the art of butterfly-wing painting had been highly admired, but was no longer practiced because the butterflies had gone extinct. She went on to the illustrations—and there it was. The very same painting she had seen earlier that day, except lit differently, so that the colors were far brighter and the girl’s expression even sadder than it had seemed.

Portrait of Jemma Diwali, the caption said. An acknowledged masterpiece of technique, this painting was lost in GM 862, when it was looted from one of the homes of the Diwali family. According to Almasy, the representational formalism of the subject is subtly circumvented by the transformational perspective, which creates an abstractionist counter-layer of imagery. It anticipates the “chaos art” of Dunleavy. … It went on about the painting as if it had no connection to anything but art theory. But all Thorn cared about was the first sentence. GM 862—the year of the Gmintan Holocide.

Jemma was staring at her gravely, as if there were some implied expectation on her mind. Thorn went back to the shelves, this time for a history of the Holocide. It seemed like there were hundreds of them. At last she picked one almost at random and typed in “Diwali.” There were uninformative references to the name scattered throughout the book. From the first two, she gathered that the Diwalis had been a Vind family associated with the government on Gmintagad. There were no mentions of Jemma.

She had left the door ajar and now heard the sounds of Hunter returning downstairs. Quickly she re-cased the books and erased her trail from the reader. She did not want him to find out just yet. This was her mystery to solve.

There wasn’t another chance to sneak into Hunter’s office before she returned to Magister Pregaldin’s apartment on Weezer Alley. She found that he had cleared a table for them to work at, directly underneath the stuffed head of a creature with curling copper-colored horns. As he checked over the work she had done the note before, her eyes were drawn irresistibly to the portrait of Jemma across the room.

At last he caught her staring at it, and their eyes met. She blurted out, “Did you know that painting comes from Gmintagad?”

A shadow of frost crossed his face. But it passed quickly, and his voice was low and even when he said, “Yes.”

“It was looted,” Thorn said. “Everyone thought it was lost.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

Accusatory thoughts were bombarding her. He must have seen them, for he said calmly, “I collect art from the Holocide.”

“That’s macabre,” she said.