The Diamond Moon (2 page)

“I called the lodge, looking for Jozsef. I was hoping he’d be with you.”

“Soon. He wanted to put his report in the files.” “It’s three o’clock. Just like him to miss the program—he thinks the world ought to take his schedule into account.”

“We’ll replay the important parts for him.” He picked up iron tongs and poked fretfully at the burning logs until they crackled with heat.

 

Ari settled into a leather couch and arranged a red and green plaid blanket over her lap. “Turn on and record,” she said in the direction of the pine-paneled wall—

—whereupon a hidden videoplate unfolded into a two-meter-square screen, thin as foil, and immediately bright-ened. “Good evening,” said the voice from the screen, “this is the All Worlds Service of the BBC, bringing you the final program in the series ‘Overmind,’ presented by Sir Randolph Mays.”

The commander looked up from the fire to see Jupiter’s clouds filling the screen. Visible in the foreground was a swift, bright spark. “Jupiter’s moon Amalthea,” came the voice of Randolph Mays, in that half-whisper of suppressed urgency. “For more than a year, the most
unusual
object in our solar system—and the
key
to its central enigma.”

Unlike most of the hundred million people watching “Overmind,” who were sure their narrator would track down the truth wherever it led—indeed, most who had seen the earlier episodes were hoping Mays would solve “the central enigma of the solar system” this very night, before their eyes—the two watching in the house in the woods were hop-ing he wouldn’t get too close to it.

“Good picture,” Ari remarked.

 

“Heard about it on the way in—it was stolen from a Space Board monitor on Ganymede. Mays had reedited the opening of his show within the last hour.”

 

“Did someone in the Space Board give it to him?”

 

“We’ll find out.”

They watched in silence then, as Sir Randolph recited his litany of coincidences: “. . . events occurring in such far-flung locales as the
hellish
surface of Venus, the
far side
of Earth’s moon, the
deserts
of Mars —and not least, at a lavish estate in England’s Somerset
countryside
. These and other
impossible
coincidences will be the subject of tonight’s program. . . .”

“Oh dear,” murmured Ari; under her blanket she hugged herself tighter. “He’s going to bring Linda into it after all, I fear.”

 

The commander left off brooding by the fire to take a seat beside her on the couch, facing the screen. “We’ve put up as high a stone wall as we can.”

 

“How does he know these things?” the woman de-manded. “Is he one of them?”

 

“They’re finished—we knew it when we went into Kingman’s place and found the destruction.”

 

“But he’s spilling secrets they killed to keep.”

 

“Probably the man has his hooks into some poor disil-lusioned soul who repented and wants to tell all. Whoever it is needs a better confessor.”

 

“No one below the rank of the knights and elders could connect Linda to the Knowledge.” Her voice betrayed her fear.

 

On screen, the title sequence faded. The final episode began. . . .

Sir Randolph Mays was a formerly obscure Cambridge historian whose title derived not from his scholarship but from the lavish charity of his youth, when he had given a good part of his inheritance to his college. Popular with his students, he had become an overnight star, a veritable viddie nova, with his first thirteen-part BBC series, “In Search of the Human Race.” Mays had seemed to move through the widespread locations of his show as if stalking elusive prey, gliding on long, corduroy-clad legs past the pillars of Karnak, up the endless stairs of Calakmul, through the jumbled maze of Çatal Hüyük. All the while his great hands sawed the air and, perched atop the neck of his black turtleneck, his square jaw worked to deliver impressively long and ve-hement sentences. It all made for a wonderful travelogue, thickly slathered over with a sort of intellectual mayonnaise.

Mays took himself quite seriously, of course; he was nothing if not opinionated. Like Arnold Toynbee and Os-wald Spengler before him, he had reduced the whole of hu-man history to a recurrent and predictable pattern. In his view, as in his predecessors’, the elements of that pattern were societies having their own life cycles of birth, growth, and death, like organisms. And like organisms—but with the aid of rapid cultural change rather than sluggish biological adaptation—societies evolved, he claimed. Just what human society was evolving toward, he left as an exercise for the viewer to determine.

The historical and ethnographic establishments assailed him for his primitive ideas, his dubious interpretations of fact, his loose definitions (What distinguished one society from another? Why, for Mays, did Jews constitute a society wherever they lived but not, for example, expatriate Hun-garians?), but a dozen eminent scholars mumbling in their dewlaps were not enough to deflate public enthusiasm. Ran-dolph Mays had something better than academic approval, something better than logic; he had an almost hypnotic presence.

That first series ran to numerous repeat screenings and set record videochip sales; the BBC begged him for another. Mays obliged with the proposal for “Overmind.”
The proposal gave even its BBC sponsors initial pause, for in it Mays set out to prove that the rise and fall of civilizations were not, after all, a matter of chance evolu-tion. According to him, a superior intelligence had guided the process, an intelligence not necessarily human, which was represented on Earth by an ancient, most secret cult.

The first dozen programs of “Overmind” adduced evi-dence for the cult’s existence in ancient glyphs and carvings and papyrus scrolls, in the alignments of ancient architec-ture and the narratives of ancient myth. It was a good story, persuasive to those who wanted to believe. Even unbelievers were amused and entertained.

As Mays knew, and as his immense audience was about to find out, tonight’s episode went well beyond ancient texts and artifacts. It brought Grand Conspiracy into the present day.

But Randolph Mays was nothing if not a shrewd showman. His viewers were forced to sit through almost the whole ensuing hour of review, during which Mays rehearsed all the evidence he had developed in preceding weeks, thrift-ily using the same locations and replaying bits of preceding shows; only the skeptic viewer would have noted that his thesis was thus reduced from thirteen hours to one.

Finally he came to his point. “They
called
themselves the Free Spirit, and by a dozen
other
names,” Mays asserted—appearing in person now, close up, swiping at the air. “
These
people were almost certainly among them.”

The next image was static, taken by a photogram camera: a fit but aging English gentleman in tweeds stood in front of a massive stone house, a shotgun crooked in his arm. His free hand stroked an aviator’s flamboyant mus-taches.

“Rupert, Lord Kingman, heir to ancient St. Joseph’s Hall,
director
of a dozen firms—including Sadler’s Bank of Delhi—who has not been seen for three years . . .”

 

Next, a woman with sleek black hair and painted red lips glared at the camera from astride a sweating polo pony, its bridle held by a turbaned Sikh.

 

“Holly Singh, M.D., Ph.D., chief of neurophysiology at the Board of Space Control’s Biological Medicine Center, who
disappeared
at precisely the same time as Lord Kingman . . .”

 

Next the screen showed a tall, lugubrious man whose fine blond hair fell across his forehead.

“Professor Albers Merck, noted xeno-archaeologist, who attempted to murder his colleague, Professor J. Q. R. For-ster—and in the same attempt killed
himself
. He failed to kill Forster, of course; he
succeeded
, however, in destroying the unique Venusian fossils housed on Port Hesperus. . . .”
Next, a publicity still showed two strapping big blond young people in technicians’ smocks, smiling at the camera from their instrument consoles.

“Also on the same date, astronomers Piet Gress and Ka-trina Balakian both committed suicide after
failing
to destroy the radiotelescope facility at Farside Base on the moon. . . .”

 

Next, a square-built man with a sandy crewcut, wearing a pinstripe suit: he was caught scowling over his shoulder as he climbed into a helicopter on a Manhattan rooftop.

“And again on the same date, the Martian plaque
dis-appeared
from the town hall of Labyrinth City on Mars. Two men were killed. Later the plaque was
recovered
on the Mar-tian moon Phobos. Within hours, Mr. John Noble, founder and chief executive of Noble Water Works of Mars, whose space plane was used in the attempted theft,
vanished
and has been
missing
ever since. . . .”

The next image was not of a person but a spacecraft, the freighter
Doradus
. The camera slowly tracked the big white freighter where it lay impounded in the Space Board yards in Earth orbit.

“This is the
Doradus
, whose crew attempted to remove the Martian plaque from Phobos—it was called a pirate ship by the media, but I assert that the
Doradus
was in fact a Free Spirit warship—although the Space Board would have us believe the vessel’s true ownership has never been
traced
farther than a bank. Yes, Sadler’s Bank of Delhi . . .”

When the next image came on the screen, Ari put a hand on the commander’s arm—giving support, or seeking it.

“Inspector Ellen Troy of the Board of Space Control,” Mays reminded his audience, although there could have been few who did not recognize the woman’s picture. “Not long ago, a household name because of her extraordinary exploits.
She
it was who rescued Forster and Merck from certain death on the surface of Venus.
She
it was who prevented the destruction of Farside Base, and
she
who snatched the Martian plaque from the grasp of
Doradus
. Then she too
vanished
—to reappear, under circumstances that have never been explained, at the very moment of the
Kon-Tiki
mutiny—only to vanish again. Where is she now?”

The haunting image of Amalthea reappeared on the screen; in Jupiter’s reflected light, the moon was swathed in mist the color of buttermilk.

“The Space Board have declared an absolute
quarantine
within 50,000 kilometers of the orbit of Amalthea. The only exception granted is on behalf of
this
man, of whom we have already heard so much.”

The media had often described J. Q. R. Forster as a banty rooster, but the newsbite Mays showed of him made him look like a jaunty miniature astronaut, breezily bounding up the steps of the Council of Worlds headquarters in Man-hattan, ignoring the mediahounds who pursued him.

“Professor Forster is now on Ganymede Base, in the final stages of preparation for his expedition to Amalthea—an expedition
approved
by the Space Board only a few short months
before
that moon revealed its idiosyncratic nature.”

Sir Randolph returned to the screen in person. For a mo-ment he was quiet, as if gathering his thoughts. It was a bold actor’s moment, showing his mastery of the medium, focussing the attention of an enormous audience on his next words.

He leaned forward. “Is Inspector Ellen Troy there too, on Ganymede, a part of Forster’s plan?”

He lowered his voice further, as if to force his watchers to lean even closer, his huge hands pulling at the air with spread fingers to draw them further into his intimate net. “Is Amalthea the focus of centuries of Free Spirit scheming? Is the mighty Board of Space Control itself a party to this grand conspiracy? I believe so, and though I cannot
prove
it tonight”—Mays drew back, straightening his gaunt frame—“I give you my word of honor that I will discover the common thread that links these events which I have brought to your attention. And having done so, I shall
expose
these ancient secrets to the light of reason.”

Ari said, “Turn off,” her voice loud in the quiet cabin. As the final credits were rolling up the screen, the image faded to black and the videoplate folded itself into the pan-eled wall.

 

Rain fell steadily on the porch roof; brick-red coals crumbled in the fireplace. The commander broke the silence. “A bit anticlimactic.”

 

“He got one thing wrong, at least,” Ari said. She didn’t have to say what she meant: Ellen Troy was not on Amal-thea.

 

Footsteps scraped on the boards of the porch. The com-mander stood up, alert. Ari threw her lap robe aside and went to open the door.
III

The man who came into the room was damp and tweedy; his thinning gray hair stuck out in wet clumps, giving him the look of a baby bird just emerged from the egg. He gath-ered Ari into his arms and hugged her enthusiastically; she laughed and stroked his wet hair. They were not much alike, but they looked well together, he in his tweeds and she in her flannel. They’d been married for decades.

“Something to warm you, Jozsef? We are having tea.”

 

“Thank you. Kip has told you of our adventures?”

 

“Not yet,” said the commander.

 

“We watched Mays pontificate. The final episode of ‘Overmind.’ ”

 

“Oh no, am I so late?” Jozsef was stricken.

 

“When has it been otherwise?” Ari said. “Don’t worry, I recorded it.”

 

“A waste of your time,” said the commander.

 

Jozsef sat heavily on the couch. Ari handed him a cup and moved the tea tray to the low pine table in front of him. “Except for one thing. Mays has connected Linda with the Free Spirit.”

 

“With Salamander?”

 

“He doesn’t know anything about Salamander,” said the commander.

 

“It’s all speculation,” Ari agreed.

 

“Nevertheless he’ll be on his way to Amalthea on
Helios
, to poke around.”

“You can confirm that?” Jozsef asked the commander, who nodded. Jozsef slurped a mouthful of the hot tea and carefully resettled the cup on its saucer. “Well, it can hardly make a significant difference. Half the reporters in the solar system, it seems, are already there, eager for news.”