The Dark Lady

advent of the Oligarchy some four hundred years ago.)
    After charting some six other systems, Klipstein came to the Corvus system, where he found one habitable world, Corvus II, and supervised the terraforming of another, Corvus III.
    When he retired from the Pioneer Corps at age forty-seven, he settled on Corvus III, purchasing a huge estate that was unsuitable for farming, and lived in unthinkable isolation, far from family and friends. The Democracy was unable to closely monitor all the Frontier worlds it had accumulated, and when Corvus III was invaded by the Klokanni, their Navy was in no position to come to the aid of the embattled colonists. The planet was conquered in less than three days, and it was then that Klipstein began a one-man campaign of sabotage and terrorism that resulted in the abandonment of Corvus III by the Klokanni. When it was over, he was offered the governorship of Corvus III, which was now renamed Klipstein. He refused, and returned to live out his remaining years alone on his estate. There was no data in any of the biographies about his work as an artist, and I suspect that his output was minimal, for although it is obviously computer-enhanced, it is nonetheless a striking piece, and had he guided his computer in producing many more such works he would surely have received some measure of recognition within the field.
    My other duty, in addition to purchasing renderings of the woman with whom Mr. Abercrombie has become so fascinated, is to try to find other works of art in which she is featured. Since her appearance in paintings created thousands of years and trillions of miles apart remains a mystery, I hoped I might clarify it by finding out what, if anything, the various artists had in common. To that end, I instructed the library's master computer to attempt to determine what background or experiences Klipstein might have shared with Christopher Kilcullen, an artist whose painting of the woman had recently been auctioned on Far London.
    The answer was discouraging. Klipstein died almost two millennia before Kilcullen was born. They lived fifty-five thousand light-years apart. Klipstein was an explorer and mapmaker; Kilcullen, a career officer in the Navy. Neither had ever studied art, and while it seemed apparent that the hologram was Klipstein's only serious venture into the field, Kilcullen was well on his way to establishing a reputation at the time of his death. Klipstein was an atheist; Kilcullen, a devout member of a minor Christian cult. Klipstein had never married, and the biographies imply that he may have lived a totally celibate life; Kilcullen was married four times, divorcing his first wife and outliving his next three. Indeed, so diverse were their lives that the only thing I could find in common is that each, at one point, fought against overwhelming enemy strength with commendable courage, even heroism.
    This led me to believe that the subject may not have been a real woman, but rather the representation of some ancient war goddess. The computer, however, was able to find no dark-haired goddess of war in human mythology. I then had it determine whether any dark-haired woman existed as a founding member or even a patron saint of the Navy, and was given a negative response, not very surprising considering that Klipstein's battle hardly qualified as an official action of the Navy.
    I spent my final hours on Binder X in the library, trying to find some link between their lives other than the military, while the computer continued to insist that none existed.
    Finally I had to leave for New Rhodesia, and I boarded a small passenger ship, my questions still unanswered. Fortunately this ship, too, had a complement of non-human passengers, and I was able to spend most of the voyage in their midst. I had to transfer ships at the little colony world of Morioth II. The remainder of my journey was almost unbearable, as there were only six other passengers, five Men and a Canphorite, and they kept entirely to their compartments. By the time we landed I had concluded that Klipstein was totally mad, for no sane being would willingly shut himself off from the warmth and safety of other members of his own species.
    (In fact, my revered Pattern Mother, the thought has occurred to me that the galaxy is dominated by a completely insane race, for who but Man so cherishes the frightening concept of privacy? Certainly a case can be made for it.)
    New Rhodesia is a lovely green and blue