The Dark Lady

fighting. What's the matter with you Bjornns?”
    “Perhaps the answer is that, unlike Man and the inhabitants of Canphor VI and VII, the Bjornn do not descend from carnivores, and therefore lack your aggressive traits.”
    He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged.
    “All right,” he said. “Let's get down to business.”
    “Then my answers have satisfied you?”
    “Not especially. But they've convinced me that you haven't got the guts to rob me.” He got to his feet. “Follow me.”
    “At what distance?” I asked, recalling his stricture about not approaching him.
    “Just shut up and do it,” he growled, walking to a door. He opened it just as I reached him, and I followed him into a large, well-lit gallery, perhaps seventy feet long and twenty wide. Some fifty paintings and holograms hung on the dark wood walls, each by an acknowledged master.
    “Exquisite!” I exclaimed, examining a Ramotti landscape from her Late Purple Period. “Such elegant brushwork!”
    “Are you familiar with all the paintings?” he asked.
    “No,” I admitted. “A number of them are unfamiliar to me.”
    “But you know the artists?”
    I looked again. “Yes.”
    “Three of them are phony. Tell me which ones.”
    “How much time have I?” I asked.
    “As long as you want.” He paused. “You're glowing again.”
    “I enjoy a challenge,” I said— and the intensity of my color vanished an instant later as I realized what a self-centered statement I had uttered.
    I walked up and down the gallery, pausing before each painting and hologram, analyzing them as quickly as I could. Finally I returned to Abercrombie, being careful to stop some ten feet short of him.
    “You tried to trick me, Mr. Abercrombie,” I said with a smile. “There are four fraudulent pieces.”
    “The hell there are!” he snapped.
    “The Skarlos portrait, the Ngoni still life, the Perkins hologram, and the Menke nude are all duplicates.”
    “I spent 800,000 credits for the Ngoni!”
    “Then you were deceived,” I said gently. “Ngoni lived on New Kenya five centuries ago, yet the paint is less than three centuries old.”
    “How can you tell?” he demanded.
    I tried to explain how a Bjornn can analyze the chemical composition of paints and the diverse textures of canvas, wood, and particle boards, but since human eyes cannot see as far into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum, it was beyond his comprehension, nor were there any dialects that could incorporate the proper terms into their Terran equivalents, which did not in fact exist.
    “All right,” he said. “I'll take your word for it.” He paused, lost in thought, then looked up. “I'll send it to Odysseus for an authentication certificate, and if it doesn't pass muster, my agent on New Kenya is going to wish he'd never been born.”
    “Was I correct about the other three?”
    He nodded his head.
    “May I assume, then, that I am here to authenticate various purchases you have made or are considering making?”
    “No,” he said. “But I wanted to see if you knew your stuff.” He paused, then added grudgingly: “You do.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Abercrombie.”
    “Come into the next room,” he said, opening a door at the end of the gallery. I followed him into a small room— small for this house, at least— and found myself in a windowless enclosure, the walls of which were covered by seventeen paintings and five holograms, as well as a pair of exquisitely crafted cameos and a small statue— and each of them featured a likeness of the woman in the Kilcullen painting.
    “Well?” he said, after allowing me to briefly examine them.
    “I am most impressed,” I said, the intensity of my color deepening once again. “I believe that four of the paintings were rendered prior to the Galactic Era.”
    “They were,” he replied. “And the statue predates the birth of Christ.”
    “What religion does she represent?” I asked.
    “None.”
    I felt confused. “But for the same woman to appear in artwork separated by so many thousands of years and trillions of miles would certainly imply that she is a formidable myth-figure in the history of your culture.”
    “She has nothing to do with the history of my culture,” said Abercrombie adamantly.
    “Then can there be some other explanation for why her likeness has appeared in so many diverse works of art?” I asked.
    “I haven't got any idea,” he replied.
    “It is most curious,” I said, standing back and