he saw them. The door slid aside to reveal him seated at a typer, moving his hands almost faster than the eye could follow.
I’d been here often enough to know my way around. I went into the little annexe kept for visitors and rinsed travel-dust from face and hands. Then I came back as quietly as I could. Micky was copying from a rough draft, and he’d reached the last page.
These rooms were part of the ‘new’ university buildings – already a century old, but upstarts compared with some of Cambridge’s really ancient architecture. I sank into a chair and enjoyed the aura of peace which the place exuded.
The walls were crowded floor to ceiling with books andmicrofilm spools; the range stretched from recently imported Viridian poetry, rather ostentatiously printed with hand-set type on hand-made paper, to a group of three identical red-bound volumes thickly covered with dust. They were copies of Mick’s own novel,
Stars Beckoned,
historical romance about the early days of Venus colonization.
The number of interests this room reflected was fantastic. A theremin stood under the main window, its flex coiled over an antique and fabulously valuable guitar. Rows of loose-leaf binders containing semantic and sociological notes were half-hidden behind, reproductions of classical sculpture: a Rodin, a Henry Moore, the Venus de Milo, and Kasneky’s
Virtue.
On the table beside me was a splendidly bound folio volume whose yellowed page-ends indicated that it was made of woodpulp paper instead of everlasting plastic. Curious, I opened it. It was a collection of engravings by a twenty-first century artist called Laslo Curtin, whom I’d never heard of. They were amazingly good. When I’d leafed to the end, I turned back to the inside front cover to see where Micky had got hold of it. Tacked there with pseudo-magnetic gum so as not to mark the book and spoil its curio value, was a bookplate inscribed with the resounding name of Miguel Fernando José Maria de Madrigal de las Altas Torres.
‘Found my Curtin, have you?’ Micky said, slapping the cover over the typer. ‘Mother picked it up in Buenos Aires last month and sent it to me.’
I indicated the imposing name. ‘Is all this you?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, it’s all me. Mother, bless her, is much prouder of my Spanish antecedents than she ought to be, seeing she’s mostly Norwegian herself. Still, I suppose anyone who’s inherited a long tradition of middle-class Socialism can be excused a hankering after the glamour of autocracy. Madrigal de las Altas Torres – sounds like aline from a song, doesn’t it? – is where Queen Isabella was born. They had some colourful royalty in Scandinavia too, of course, which makes me wonder sometimes about the lure of the exotic.’ He folded his ungainly-looking body into a chair facing mine. ‘However, how are you?’
‘Rather bedraggled. I’ve had a tough couple of days.’
Micky clicked his tongue sympathetically. He was tall and bony. His father’s night-black hair and jet eyes contrasted with a skin almost milky in its clearness. Somehow the mixture of genes which produced that had also created the nearest thing to a
uomo universale –
I was ready to swear it – that we’d had in a hundred years. He was doing postgraduate research on the staff of the sociology foundation here and writing his doctorate thesis. Though, as Tinescu had rudely reminded me, he was twenty years my junior, he already had a reputation which would allow him to pick his own post when he was ready. On top of that, he was practically unchallenged as an authority on the social evolution of Starhome.
‘I have some bad news for you,’ he went on. ‘Remember I said there were anomalies in your recent reports from Starhome? Well, they weren’t accidents. They look like deliberate fakes.’
‘I know,’ I said, and explained what had happened.
‘The Stars Are For Man League? Now what would
that
gang want to mess up Starhomer data for?’ he
I’d been here often enough to know my way around. I went into the little annexe kept for visitors and rinsed travel-dust from face and hands. Then I came back as quietly as I could. Micky was copying from a rough draft, and he’d reached the last page.
These rooms were part of the ‘new’ university buildings – already a century old, but upstarts compared with some of Cambridge’s really ancient architecture. I sank into a chair and enjoyed the aura of peace which the place exuded.
The walls were crowded floor to ceiling with books andmicrofilm spools; the range stretched from recently imported Viridian poetry, rather ostentatiously printed with hand-set type on hand-made paper, to a group of three identical red-bound volumes thickly covered with dust. They were copies of Mick’s own novel,
Stars Beckoned,
historical romance about the early days of Venus colonization.
The number of interests this room reflected was fantastic. A theremin stood under the main window, its flex coiled over an antique and fabulously valuable guitar. Rows of loose-leaf binders containing semantic and sociological notes were half-hidden behind, reproductions of classical sculpture: a Rodin, a Henry Moore, the Venus de Milo, and Kasneky’s
Virtue.
On the table beside me was a splendidly bound folio volume whose yellowed page-ends indicated that it was made of woodpulp paper instead of everlasting plastic. Curious, I opened it. It was a collection of engravings by a twenty-first century artist called Laslo Curtin, whom I’d never heard of. They were amazingly good. When I’d leafed to the end, I turned back to the inside front cover to see where Micky had got hold of it. Tacked there with pseudo-magnetic gum so as not to mark the book and spoil its curio value, was a bookplate inscribed with the resounding name of Miguel Fernando José Maria de Madrigal de las Altas Torres.
‘Found my Curtin, have you?’ Micky said, slapping the cover over the typer. ‘Mother picked it up in Buenos Aires last month and sent it to me.’
I indicated the imposing name. ‘Is all this you?’
He laughed. ‘Yes, it’s all me. Mother, bless her, is much prouder of my Spanish antecedents than she ought to be, seeing she’s mostly Norwegian herself. Still, I suppose anyone who’s inherited a long tradition of middle-class Socialism can be excused a hankering after the glamour of autocracy. Madrigal de las Altas Torres – sounds like aline from a song, doesn’t it? – is where Queen Isabella was born. They had some colourful royalty in Scandinavia too, of course, which makes me wonder sometimes about the lure of the exotic.’ He folded his ungainly-looking body into a chair facing mine. ‘However, how are you?’
‘Rather bedraggled. I’ve had a tough couple of days.’
Micky clicked his tongue sympathetically. He was tall and bony. His father’s night-black hair and jet eyes contrasted with a skin almost milky in its clearness. Somehow the mixture of genes which produced that had also created the nearest thing to a
uomo universale –
I was ready to swear it – that we’d had in a hundred years. He was doing postgraduate research on the staff of the sociology foundation here and writing his doctorate thesis. Though, as Tinescu had rudely reminded me, he was twenty years my junior, he already had a reputation which would allow him to pick his own post when he was ready. On top of that, he was practically unchallenged as an authority on the social evolution of Starhome.
‘I have some bad news for you,’ he went on. ‘Remember I said there were anomalies in your recent reports from Starhome? Well, they weren’t accidents. They look like deliberate fakes.’
‘I know,’ I said, and explained what had happened.
‘The Stars Are For Man League? Now what would
that
gang want to mess up Starhomer data for?’ he
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