Chapter 4
My Dear Pattern Mother:
Much has happened in the six weeks that I have been in the employ of Mr. Malcolm Abercrombie, and now that I am once again on Far London, I shall relate the details to you.
But first I think I should tell you about Mr. Abercrombie himself, since you expressed some dismay about my entering his employ, based on my first description of him.
He is, in truth, a most unusual man. I originally felt that he was a bigot; I was wrong. It would be fairer to say that he dislikes all races equally, including Man. And yet I am no longer uncomfortable in his company, possibly because he treats me with the same lack of cordiality that he treats everyone, even his own granddaughter.
And, as if in contradiction to my assessment, he is also capable of acts of the utmost generosity and loyalty, although he does not like to be thanked for them, and indeed is at his most surly on those occasions when I have tried.
For example, I had to journey to Binder X on a mission for him. Only one passenger ship per week flies there from Far London, since it has little commerce with the Inner Frontier, and when I applied for passage, I was told that all the second-class seats had been taken and that aliens (which is Man’s somewhat curious term for non-Men, since Man himself is an alien on more than a million worlds) were not permitted to purchase first-class compartments, even though I was demonstrably able to pay for one and more than half of them had not been sold. I reported my predicament to Mr. Abercrombie, who made a single call—and suddenly I was given not merely a compartment but a two-room suite! It was such an act of generosity that I could not bring myself to tell him that the moment the ship took off I immediately left my quarters and spent most of the journey in the second-class lounge, mingling with the other non-human passengers. If he cannot understand the concept of the House, how could I ever explain to him the warmth and security of the Herd?
When I thanked him for sparing me this imagined humiliation, he replied that I was his employee, and that the insult was to him. It was not the treatment of aliens as inferiors that bothered him; in fact, it is a concept with which he is in wholehearted agreement. But the treatment of Malcolm Abercrombie’s servants as inferiors is evidently not to be tolerated, even when that servant is myself.
He is truly a man of contradictions. One of the wealthiest men on Far London, able to purchase anything that he desires, he nonetheless seems not to enjoy his money. His knowledge of art is, at best, limited, and yet he has spent a considerable portion of his fortune on it. Most Men refuse to use robotic or non-human assistants or employees, fearing the encroachment of the former and feeling contemptuous of the latter, but Mr. Abercrombie’s house is run by three robots, and I am the only other sentient entity with access to the premises. He has made an enormous contribution to a local hospital in the name of one of his deceased sons, and yet he distrusts doctors so much that he suffers with a very painful tumor at the base of his spine rather than allow them to remove it. He refuses to speak about either of his dead sons, though I feel certain that he loved them; he speaks constantly of his daughter and his grandchild, both of whom—unbelievably—he loathes. He spends thousands of credits on his gardens, and never walks through them or even looks at them from his window. He speaks to me in the most insulting manner, and yet I believe he would never permit any other Man to do the same, at least while I am in his employ. He pays me barely enough for my own subsistence, and yet I know he has made generous arrangements with both the Claiborne Galleries and the House of Crsthionn. He has a huge stock of wine, whiskey, and other human stimulants, but I have never known him to partake of any of them, nor does he keep them for visitors, of which he has absolutely none.
His library, both of books and tapes, is virtually nonexistent, nor has he an entertainment center in his house, and yet he rarely leaves, preferring to monitor his investments and issue his orders via his computer. He claims to have no interest in alien races, and yet whenever I mention the Bjornn, he always has questions about them. He is especially interested in the organization of the House, but seems totally incapable of understanding that it is the Pattern that determines the House rather than the reverse. And he is alternately mystified and outraged by the concept of blood mothers and Pattern Mothers, and although he disdains his own daughter’s company, he cannot comprehend why I have no interest whatsoever in my blood mother. He is furious that his daughter married a man of whom he disapproved, which is perfectly understandable; while at the same time, he is mystified by the fact that I have no objection to the House having selected my Pattern Mate for me while I was still a child.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this singularly fascinating man is his obsession with a woman who may never have existed, and who, if indeed she did exist, has been dead for at least seven millennia.
In fact, it is this obsession that led to my current employment, for in his quest for artwork featuring this woman, Mr. Abercrombie has retained me in the dual capacities of purchasing agent and researcher.
My first assignment was to fly to Binder X to obtain a hologram featuring this particular woman. The voyage took five uneventful days, during which time I made the acquaintance of a number of Declanites and Darbeenans, who were making connections at Binder to their own distant planets.
Once on Binder X it took me two days to trace the hologram, and finally I presented myself to its owner, a woman named Hannah Comstock. She was not the person who had purchased it when I attended the auction at which it had been sold a few years ago, but had evidently bought it privately in the intervening years. The attitude toward non-humans is considerably more liberal on the worlds of the Inner Frontier, and I had no difficulty securing an invitation to visit her at her home, which was about five miles from the center of Fort Rodriguez, the smallest of Binder X’s five cities.
Upon arriving, I explained the purpose of my mission—that I had been authorized to purchase the hologram for Malcolm Abercrombie—and after her initial protestations that she admired it too much to ever part with it, she named a price that I considered to be at least half again what it was worth. I relayed this information to Mr. Abercrombie, who contacted her himself and concluded the purchase while I was sleeping at my hotel.
When I arrived at Mrs. Comstock’s house the next morning to take possession of the hologram, I asked her if she knew anything about its history. She did not, but had purchased it because of the artist, a man named Peter Klipstein. His name was unfamiliar to me, and she explained that he was the man who had opened up the Corvus system to human colonization, and that they regard him as a great hero. She had therefore concluded that Klipstein’s name probably made the hologram quite valuable, at least to the Corvus colonists, and had purchased it primarily as an investment. I inquired if she knew of any other Klipstein holograms, and she replied that she was unaware of the existence of any, and had indeed been surprised to find that he had created this one, although she had the signature authenticated before purchasing it.
Since my ship did not leave for New Rhodesia, my next port of call, for another day, I stopped by a local library and had the main computer bring up Peter Klipstein’s biographical data for me. This was a mistake, since he has been the subject of no less than twenty-seven full-length biographies. Finally I had the computer sift through the biographies and supply me with a ten-thousand-word history of the man, which I shall now condense even further for you.
Peter Klipstein was a member of the Pioneer Corps, that branch of the government charged with charting and exploring new worlds for human colonization in the early days of the Republic, some twenty-five centuries ago. (Evidently the Pioneer Corps had been created at the onset of the Galactic Era, survived through both the Republic and the Democracy, and was disbanded only after the advent of the Oligarchy some four hundred years ago.)
After charting some six other systems, Klipstein came to the Corvus system, where he found one habitable world, Corvus II, and supervised the terraforming of another, Corvus III.
When he retired from the Pioneer Corps at age forty-seven, he settled on Corvus III, purchasing a huge estate that was unsuitable for farming, and lived in unthinkable isolation, far from family and friends. The Democracy was unable to closely monitor all the Frontier worlds it had accumulated, and when Corvus III was invaded by the Klokanni, their Navy was in no position to come to the aid of the embattled colonists. The planet was conquered in less than three days, and it was then that Klipstein began a one-man campaign of sabotage and terrorism that resulted in the abandonment of Corvus III by the Klokanni. When it was over, he was offered the governorship of Corvus III, which was now renamed Klipstein. He refused, and returned to live out his remaining years alone on his estate. There was no data in any of the biographies about his work as an artist, and I suspect that his output was minimal, for although it is obviously computer-enhanced, it is nonetheless a striking piece, and had he guided his computer in producing many more such works he would surely have received some measure of recognition within the field.
My other duty, in addition to purchasing renderings of the woman with whom Mr. Abercrombie has become so fascinated, is to try to find other works of art in which she is featured. Since her appearance in paintings created thousands of years and trillions of miles apart remains a mystery, I hoped I might clarify it by finding out what, if anything, the various artists had in common. To that end, I instructed the library’s master computer to attempt to determine what background or experiences Klipstein might have shared with Christopher Kilcullen, an artist whose painting of the woman had recently been auctioned on Far London.
The answer was discouraging. Klipstein died almost two millennia before Kilcullen was born. They lived fifty-five thousand light-years apart. Klipstein was an explorer and mapmaker; Kilcullen, a career officer in the Navy. Neither had ever studied art, and while it seemed apparent that the hologram was Klipstein’s only serious venture into the field, Kilcullen was well on his way to establishing a reputation at the time of his death. Klipstein was an atheist; Kilcullen, a devout member of a minor Christian cult. Klipstein had never married, and the biographies imply that he may have lived a totally celibate life; Kilcullen was married four times, divorcing his first wife and outliving his next three. Indeed, so diverse were their lives that the only thing I could find in common is that each, at one point, fought against overwhelming enemy strength with commendable courage, even heroism.
This led me to believe that the subject may not have been a real woman, but rather the representation of some ancient war goddess. The computer, however, was able to find no dark-haired goddess of war in human mythology. I then had it determine whether any dark-haired woman existed as a founding member or even a patron saint of the Navy, and was given a negative response, not very surprising considering that Klipstein’s battle hardly qualified as an official action of the Navy.
I spent my final hours on Binder X in the library, trying to find some link between their lives other than the military, while the computer continued to insist that none existed.
Finally I had to leave for New Rhodesia, and I boarded a small passenger ship, my questions still unanswered. Fortunately this ship, too, had a complement of non-human passengers, and I was able to spend most of the voyage in their midst. I had to transfer ships at the little colony world of Morioth II. The remainder of my journey was almost unbearable, as there were only six other passengers, five Men and a Canphorite, and they kept entirely to their compartments. By the time we landed I had concluded that Klipstein was totally mad, for no sane being would willingly shut himself off from the warmth and safety of other members of his own species.
(In fact, my revered Pattern Mother, the thought has occurred to me that the galaxy is dominated by a completely insane race, for whom but Man so cherishes the frightening concept of privacy? Certainly a case can be made for it.)
New Rhodesia is a lovely green and blue world. Its northern continent is composed almost entirely of heavily forested mountains, but its two southern continents, flat and crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, are ideal for farming. It has a unique trade arrangement with its sister world, New Zimbabwe, which is some seven light-years distant, and supplies it with all of its metals and fissionable materials in exchange for grains and meats. Furthermore, the two worlds have pooled their resources to form an economic cooperative when trading with all other worlds of the Oligarchy.
The Lodinite ambassador met me at the spaceport (only Lodin XI, Canphor VI and VII, and Galaheen IX, of all the non-human worlds, have embassies on New Rhodesia). With his help it took less than an hour to locate the owner of the painting I sought, as New Rhodesia, being primarily an agricultural world, is far less populated than New Zimbabwe, where almost eighty percent of the people from this unique economic cooperative reside. The ambassador warned me that the New Rhodesians were more xenophobic than was common for a Frontier world, and even with his intervention on my behalf, I spent a full day working my way through an inordinate number of restrictions and petty statutes before I was allowed to leave the spaceport and proceed to my destination.
The man I sought was Orestes Minneola, a retired dietary chemist who lived in a luxurious apartment in Salisbury, a bustling city about two hundred miles west of the spaceport. He invited me into his main room and treated me with civility, but I could tell that my presence made him uncomfortable. When he learned the purpose of my visit, he allowed me to examine the painting, which he had hanging in another room, but he stated that it was not for sale as it possessed a certain sentimental value to him. I explained that Mr. Abercrombie would pay him considerably more than he himself had paid for it, but he remained adamant.
Finally, when he had convinced me that he was not merely assuming an aggressive bargaining position but indeed had no intention of parting with the painting, I asked him what particular attachment he had to the painting. He replied that Rafael Jamal, the artist, was one of his heroes, and had supposedly spent the last few years of his life working on the painting.
This seemed to confirm my conviction that the subject was indeed derived from an ancient war myth, and I inquired whether Jamal had fought for the Navy or for some independent force. Mr. Minneola seemed confused, and finally admitted that he had no knowledge whatsoever of Jamal’s military record.
It was my turn to be confused, for I had never heard of a Man referred to as a hero unless he had excelled in military action. My host explained that I was mistaken, departed the room for a moment, and returned with a scrapbook of circus posters from all over the galaxy, explaining that he was an enthusiastic patron of circuses and a student of their history. He thumbed through the book until he came to a colorful if poorly rendered poster of a very young, athletic-looking man in skintight, sequin-covered garments, swinging on a device called a trapeze. This was Jamal, and according to Mr. Minneola he was a famed circus entertainer whose specialty was a quintuple somersault from one trapeze to another without benefit of a net. His career had ended with a tragic accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and he had died some four years later. I thanked Mr. Minneola for his time and courtesy, began the search for a hotel (a number of them had vacancies, but non-humans were not permitted inside them), finally found a dilapidated hostelry on the outskirts of what the colonists termed the Native Quarter (although there were no sentient natives on New Rhodesia, and indeed it was simply a euphemism for ghetto), and reported to Mr. Abercrombie that I had located the painting but that the owner refused to part with it for any price. Far from seeming discouraged, the news seemed to excite him; like most Men, he seemed to cherish only those things for which he had to fight. On the return flight, I was supposed to transfer ships at the orbiting hangar at Pellinath IV, but at the last moment we had to divert to Pico II, as the Bellum, Pellinath’s only sentient race, were resisting incorporation into the Oligarchy’s economic system, and the Navy had moved in to forcibly convince them to reconsider. No citizens or associate members of the Oligarchy were allowed in the area, and I had to wait on Pico for three days, until the Bellum had been beaten into acquiescence.
Though I found its bleak landscape and extinct volcanoes fascinating, I was told that Pico II was considered a minor and unimportant world by the Oligarchy, its sole claim to fame being the fact that the notorious criminal Santiago had once been imprisoned there more than two thousand years ago. It was a relatively underpopulated world then, and so it remains today.
I visited the local library and asked its computer for biographical data on Rafael Jamal, with special attention to his military record. It searched its memory for almost three minutes before replying that the only reference it had to Jamal was a single newstape article concerning his accident. I suggested that it tie in to a larger computer on Pellinath or some other nearby world, discovered that the fee for expending so much energy on this energy-poor planet was exorbitant, and decided to start running the names of the artists in Abercrombie’s collection through it instead. The first seven names had indeed served in the military—but the eighth had not, and by the time the computer had processed the nineteen names it could find, it turned out that five of them had no record of military service. I refused to abandon my theory that the woman was some ancient military myth-figure until I had determined whether the five had seen some sort of unofficial guerrilla action, but I realized that I would have to wait until I could access the Far London computer.
When it became apparent that our stay on Pico II was to last more than a few hours, I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in the Rarities and Collectibles Room. There were a number of books there—actual books, with paper and binding—and since I had never seen one before, I selected a number of hefty ancient volumes dealing with human art, went off to a cubicle in the Alien Section, and began thumbing through the pages of a book of modernist spacescapes. An hour later I had worked my way through about half the books when suddenly I came upon yet another portrait of Mr. Abercrombie’s unknown woman.
As always, she was dressed in black, and, as always, the exquisite regularity of her features was highlighted by an expression of infinite sorrow. I quickly checked the pertinent data and found that the portrait was completed on Earth in 1908 A.D., in a country called Uganda. The artist was a naturalist named Brian McGinnis, who was known primarily for the discovery of two rare species of orchid that grew on the slopes of a volcanic mountain; his only prior artwork had been a series of pastels of various orchids.
The biographical sketch of McGinnis went on to say that he had been born in a country called Scotland, had received his education in botany and biology, had spent four years in the military, and had gone to Uganda, a wild and primitive land, at the age of twenty-eight. He published seventeen monographs, thirteen on orchids, three on local fauna, and one on volcanic formations, and died of an unknown disease at the age of thirty-six, in the year 1910 A.D.
I have analyzed such data as I had been able to accumulate on the four artists, and I am still convinced that my theory is correct. If Jamal had indeed served in the military, it was the only thing they had in common, other than the fact that all four were human males who had each committed the same woman to canvas or hologram—and I am confident that when I access a Far London computer, it will confirm Jamal’s military service.
I then asked the library computer to determine the current whereabouts of the McGinnis painting, but again, it was unable to help me, nor could it give me any information concerning Reuben Venzia, a man about whom Mr. Abercrombie wants some information. In truth, I cannot understand why the people of Pico II have never bothered to upgrade their library computer.
I finally went back to my room, prepared to contact Mr. Abercrombie and relate this new find to him, but the hotel’s subspace tightbeam did not have the power to reach Far London, and the cost of patching the message through Zartaska and Gamma Leporis IX, the least complicated route, was so great that I decided to wait until I returned to Far London to inform him of my discovery.
I spent the remainder of my time on Pico II in the library, examining every volume of artwork there in the hope of finding yet another rendering of Mr. Abercrombie’s mysterious woman, but with no success; and when the announcement came through that the Navy had subdued the Bellum, I reported to the ship and continued my voyage back to Far London.
When I arrived I went directly to Mr. Abercrombie’s house, and found, to my amazement, that the Jamal painting was already hanging in his gallery. I expressed my surprise that he had purchased it so quickly, when Mr. Minneola had seemed so determined not to part with it, and he replied triumphantly that when he went after something he always got what he wanted. In this case, to use Mr. Abercrombie’s own words (and I apologize for his vulgarity): “I damned near had to buy him a circus of his own.” His own purchasing agent, it would seem, had somehow circumvented the Navy’s blockade to bring him the painting, which is how it arrived ahead of me.
He seemed elated when I told him of the McGinnis painting, and ordered me to spare no expense in tracking it down. When I explained that I didn’t know how to begin, and suggested that the painting, which was far from famous and had been rendered six thousand years earlier, might very well no longer exist, he became loud and even abusive at the suggestion, insisted that I was trying to sabotage his attempts to complete his collection, and demanded that I leave his presence and get back to work.
To the hunger for privacy which I mentioned earlier, I must now add another trait Mr. Abercrombie possesses that is unique to the race of Man and might well be an additional symptom of mental instability: obsession.
This woman doubtless never existed. She can have no possible meaning for Mr. Abercrombie. She has never been rendered by an artist of note. And yet my employer has spent a considerable portion of his fortune purchasing her portraits, and I am convinced that had Mr. Minneola not been willing to sell his painting, Mr. Abercrombie would not have hesitated to steal it. All this because of a human woman with a hauntingly sad face.
I might add that the model herself remains a fascinating mystery. How is it that men separated by thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of light-years have come to render the very same subject? Why has she never been painted by one of the masters? In fact, why has she never been painted by any race but Man? Why is she never smiling, or wearing any color other than black? Other than the fact that all the men who painted her may have engaged in some form of armed conflict, what else do they have in common that I have somehow overlooked? Who is she, and what does she represent to them? Why has her name never been used in any of the portraits’ titles?
I consider these fascinating questions constantly, and I am very grateful that I am a Bjornn and not a Man, or I, too, could fall prey to obsession.
As always, I wish you prosperity for the House and security for the Family.
Your devoted Pattern Son,
***