The Devil's Eye

galactic rim. Vicki Greene didn't respond, didn't send a message, didn't say anything. The hours dragged on, and the double star grew into a pair of spheres. But Alex couldn't put it out of his mind. When we got closer, where the delay in signal exchange wouldn't be so great, he placed a call to her but was informed the code was inoperative. Temporarily out of service. Ordinarily he'd have dismissed the whole thing at that point as the work of a crank, but since it was Greene, he couldn't let go. Maybe it was that she was an icon, the biggest name in supernatural fiction. Not that he ever read any of it, but he liked meeting celebrities as much as the next guy. So, a day and a half after we'd tried to communicate with her, we docked at Skydeck and headed directly for Karl's Dellacondan Restaurant. It was traditionally our first stop after a flight. It doesn't matter how good the shipboard food is, and we get good stuff on board the Belle-Marie , it's always a pleasure to make for a real dining room, spread out, and eat from a fresh menu. We were just walking into the place when he brought her up again. 'She must be okay,' he said, 'or she'd have gotten back to me right away.' He was genuinely worried. More than the meet-the-deranged-celebrity thing. I'd known him for four years by then, and I still couldn't figure out how his mind worked. I'd have been interested to know what Selotta might have been able to tell me about him. It was unsettling to realize she'd only spent a few days with the guy and knew him far better than I ever would. Maybe that's the real reason people resent the Mutes so much. 'She probably sobered up,' I said. He looked at me with an expression that told me we both knew she hadn't been drinking. So I let it go, and the host led us to a corner table. We sat down beside a window. Brilliant splotches of light were spread across the globe. In the north, lightning glimmered. 'Have you ever read any of her novels?' he asked. 'No,' I said. 'Never had time.' 'Make time. She's good.' 'When did you read them?' 'I read Dying to Know You on the way in.' He took a moment to examine the menu. 'Great stuff,' he added. 'You mean the food?' 'I'm talking about Greene. I was surprised how good she is.'

'I like fiction that's a little more realistic.' He went into his paternal mode. 'You need to open your mind to new experiences, Chase.' 'I guess. You'd really like to meet her, wouldn't you?' 'Yes,' he said. 'I would.' 'You get in trouble,' I told him, 'you're on your own.'

I was glad to see Ben Colbee again. Ben had twice proposed to me. All the signs were there. I saw passion in his eyes, watched him light up whenever I walked into a room. And I think I was in love with him, too. At least, I'd never felt about anybody else the way I felt about him. Ben was a good guy, sensitive, smart, good-looking, and he knew how to make me laugh. That's the big thing. Make me laugh. He was a musician. He played cornerstone with the Full Boat, which-he thought-was moving up and would shortly make him famous. That did eventually happen, but it's another story. Anyhow, Ben was waiting as I knew he would be when the shuttle got in. He offered to take Alex home, too, but Alex knows when he's an encumbrance, so he said no thanks, you guys go ahead, and threw his bags into a taxi and took off. We did some smooches, and Ben asked me how the flight had been and told me about the Full Boat's latest gig at the Sundown. Then, somewhere in there, he looked at me funny. 'What's wrong, Chase?' 'Nothing, Ben. Just a crank message we got on the way home.' He asked me about it so I told him. I didn't mention who it was from, though. 'This guy was a complete stranger?' he asked. 'It was from a woman. And yes, she was nobody we knew.' 'Not one of your customers, right? Somebody you maybe forgot about?' 'No, Ben. Not somebody we forgot about.' He rolled his eyes. 'Crazy people everywhere. I wouldn't worry about it.' We left Andiquar behind and headed out over the western hills. And, to make a long story short, I wasn't very receptive to his advances, not at all what he'd expected when I'd been gone almost three weeks. Hell, not what I'd expected. And I don't think it had anything to do with Alex and the crazy woman. I'm not sure what it was. I had a feeling we were approaching another one of those moments when Ben was going to pour out his heart to me. I'd been gone a long time, and he'd missed me, and-well, you know. And as much as I liked him, loved him, whatever, I wanted to head it off. So I explained I wasn't much in the mood. Tired. Long trip. He deflated and said okay, he'd see me the next day. If that was all right. 'You know,' he added, 'you're gone a lot.' 'I know.' 'I mean, Chase, you're gone all the time.' 'I'm sorry, Ben. I can't help that. It's my job.' He took me into his arms. It was a bear hug, delicious because he meant it, disconcerting because I didn't want it to go any further. He hung on to me, squeezed tight, his cheek against mine. 'It's not the only job in the world, you know. There are others.' 'Ben, I like this job. I mean, I really like it.' 'I know. But we don't get to see each other for weeks at a time. Is that really what you want?' He released me, and I stepped back and looked into those puppy-dog brown eyes. All right, I know how this sounds. But the truth is my heart picked up, and I was damned if I knew what I wanted.

When he was gone, I looked up Vicki Greene. Carmen, my AI, gave me the basic information. She was thirty- three years old, born on the other side of the continent, currently based in Andiquar. She'd written six wildly successful novels, of which three had won the coveted Tasker Award, given each year for the most outrageous horror novel. She had master's degrees in history and mathematics, which struck me as an odd combination, and had been awarded an honorary doctorate the previous year by Tai Peng University. 'What else, Carmen?'

'Her most recent novel is Midnight and Roses , about a young woman who lives in a house where the attic opens out into different dimensions. But only after midnight.'

'Okay.'

'She's prolific. Six novels in six years. Three of her novels have been converted into holocasts, and one, Love You to Death , into a musical.' 'What do we have on her family?'

'Her mother left her husband and ran off with a philosophy professor when Vicki was three. She has an older brother. The philosophy professor brought the family east to take a faculty position at Benneval College.' Benneval was two kilometers up the coast from Andiquar. 'He died a few years ago. Apparently suffered from poor health his whole life.'

'So does she have an avatar I could speak with?'

'Wouldn't Alex take offense if you got involved?'

'I'd just be another reader. Talking to her about vampires.'

'I see. Well, it doesn't look as if it matters. She doesn't maintain an avatar.'

'You're kidding. She's a major-league writer, and she's not in the program?

'Apparently not.'

That's one of the odd things about avatars. You can go online, and you can talk to people across the ages who are effectively lost, people who were born, got married, had kids, provided a living, and did all the usual stuff. Their avatars are there, ready to talk to you about the time they cut down the elm, or the day Aunt Jenny fell into the creek. But a lot of the movers and shakers, you can't find. (I should admit here that there's a Chase Kolpath avatar. She looks pretty good, and she's ready to discuss antiquities and some of the stuff I've done with Alex. But hardly anybody ever talks to it. I stopped checking the hit count years ago.) I also looked up Hassan Goldman , the name emblazoned on Greene's shirt. I'd assumed it was a corporate logo, but it matched no company anywhere on Rimway. There were some individuals with the name, but none who seemed a likely candidate for putting it on a blouse. 'So,' I asked, 'what has she been doing recently?'

'Ah, that's what's interesting. According to information put out by her publisher, she's been on Salud Afar.'

'Salud Afar?'

'Yes.'

Salud Afar was appropriately named. It was easily the most remote human world, thirty-one thousand light- years beyond Rimway. Out in the galactic boondocks. People generally thought about Rimway as being far out, the place on the edge of the Milky Way. But Salud Afar was the real outpost, located in empty-skies country, out there all by itself. For most of its history it had been months away from the closest human worlds. It had never joined the Confederacy. 'Why was she on Salud Afar?' I asked.

'Gathering material for a book, according to my best information. Or possibly just vacationing. The data is contradictory.'

'Her next book is set on Salud Afar?'

'The data is incomplete.'

'What's it about?'

'No information there either. Only that she's off chasing werewolves.'

'You're kidding.'

'That's what it says. Chase, that's a phrase used by people in the horror industry. It simply means