He unlocked a gallery, glanced in, and stopped cold.
Not possible.
This room held the Gallery’s five Vermeers. At present, two were on loan. The other three should be on the off-white walls in their protected frames. They were.
But—
“Oh my God,” the guard said under his breath, and then very loudly. His hands shook as he pressed the alarm on his pager.
2270
The Transfer happens, as always, blindingly fast. One moment Square Three holds a small stone. The next it holds a delicate purple vase trimmed in gold.
Cran doesn’t touch it. He follows protocol and calls two members of the Handler Staff. Despite the hour, they both rush to the Project room. Marbet Hammerling’s eyes water, an extravagance that Cran deplores even as he understands it.
Salvaging anything from the past is a slow, difficult, emotional triumph. Humanity’s artistic heritage lay decaying on a deserted and contaminated Earth; nothing can be brought from the present without bringing contamination with it. But thanks to the genius of the Rahvoli Equations and the engineers who translated them to reality, some things can be saved from the past. Only things less than six cubic feet; only things deemed worthy of the huge expenditure of energy; only things non-living; only things replaced in Transfer by a rough equivalent in weight and size; only replacements that will not change the course of the timestream that has already unfolded. Otherwise, the Transfer simply did not happen. The past could only be disturbed so much.
Marbet whispers, “It is so beautiful.” Reverently she lifts it from the faint shimmer of the Square.
Cran is permitted to touch it with one finger, briefly. Only that. The vase will go into the Gallery and thousands will come to view and glory in this rightful human inheritance.
The Handlers bear away the vase. Cran paces the Project room. It’s well into the artificial lunar night; the lights of Alpha Dome have dimmed on the horizon. Cran can’t sleep; it’s been several nights since he slept. He’s old, but it isn’t that. Desire consumes him, the desire of a young man: not for sex, but for glory. Once, he thought he would be a great artist. Long ago reality killed the dream but not the gnawing disappointment, eating at his innards, his brain, his heart.
Tulia has a painting chosen for the Gallery.
His own work is shit, has always been shit, will always be shit.
Tulia, people are beginning to say, is the real thing. A genuine artist, the kind that comes along once in a generation.
Cran can’t sit still, can’t sleep, can’t lift himself, yet again, from the black pit into which he falls so often. Only one thing helps, and he has long since gotten past any qualms about its legality.
He takes the pill and waits. Ten minutes later nothing matters so much, not even his inadequacy. His brain has been temporarily rewired. Nothing works optimally, either, including his hands and his brain, both of which tremble. Small price to pay. The gnawing grows less, the pit retreats.
A flash of color catches his eye. Square Two lights up. The endlessly scanning Project has found something.
2018
“How?” James Glenwood said. And then, “Is anything missing?”
Of the National’s five Vermeers, Girl with a Flute and Girl with the Red Hat were on loan to the Frick in New York. Woman Holding a Balance and Lady Writing both hung on the walls. So did Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet. Below that, propped against the wall in a room locked all night, sat its duplicate.
A fake, of course—but how the hell did it get there?
The guard looked guilty. But Henry had worked for the museum for twenty-five years. And naturally he looked upset—suspicion was bound to fall on him as the person who locked this room last night and opened it this morning. Glenwood, a curator for thirty years, remembered well the 1990 brazen theft of Vermeer’s The Concert from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The picture had never been recovered.
Except this was not a theft. A prank? A warning of thefts to come—Look how easily I can break into this place?
Every other room in the National would now have to be meticulously checked, and every work of art. Security would have to be reviewed. The police must be called, and the Director. The curator pulled out his phone.
Only—
Phone in hand, he knelt in front of the painting that had so mysteriously appeared. Glenwood had studied seventeenth-century art his entire life. He had thousands and thousands of hours of experience, honed to an intuition that had often proved more correct than reason. He studied the picture propped against the wall, and then the one above it. His cell hung limply at his side, and a deep line crinkled his forehead.
Something here was not right.
2270
Cran has never seen anything like the picture whose image floats in Square Two.
The Squares seems to capture more three-dimensional objects than paintings, and only eleven have been Transferred since the Project began. Three Picassos, two medieval pictures that ignore perspective, two “abstracts” that seem to him nothing but blobs of paint, a Monet, a Renoir, a Takashi Murakami, and a faded triptych from some Italian church. None of them are like this.
The light! It falls on the figure, a woman bent over some sort of sewing. It glows on her burgundy gown, on the walls, on a pearl necklace lying on a table. Almost it outshines the soft glow of the Square itself. The woman seems sad, and so real that she makes Cran’s heart ache.
He stares at the picture for a long time, his mind befuddled by the drug he’s taken but his heart loud and clear. He must have this picture.
Not the Gallery. Him. For himself.
Not possible.
Unless …
He stumbles to his console and says, “Forgeries by Tulia Anson, complete catalogue, visual, at ten-second intervals.”
The screen—not a Square, just a normal holoscreen—flashes the forgeries that Tulia has completed so far. Each awaits a Square’s tracking the original somewhere in time. The
