The Dark Lady

area, and I had to wait on Pico for three days, until the Bellum had been beaten into acquiescence.
    Though I found its bleak landscape and extinct volcanoes fascinating, I was told that Pico II was considered a minor and unimportant world by the Oligarchy, its sole claim to fame being the fact that the notorious criminal Santiago had once been imprisoned there more than two thousand years ago. It was a relatively underpopulated world then, and so it remains today.
    I visited the local library and asked its computer for biographical data on Rafael Jamal, with special attention to his military record. It searched its memory for almost three minutes before replying that the only reference it had to Jamal was a single newstape article concerning his accident. I suggested that it tie in to a larger computer on Pellinath or some other nearby world, discovered that the fee for expending so much energy on this energy-poor planet was exorbitant, and decided to start running the names of the artists in Abercrombie's collection through it instead. The first seven names had indeed served in the military— but the eighth had not, and by the time the computer had processed the nineteen names it could find, it turned out that five of them had no record of military service. I refused to abandon my theory that the woman was some ancient military myth-figure until I had determined whether the five had seen some sort of unofficial guerrilla action, but I realized that I would have to wait until I could access the Far London computer.
    When it became apparent that our stay on Pico II was to last more than a few hours, I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in the Rarities and Collectibles Room. There were a number of books there— actual books, with paper and binding— and since I had never seen one before, I selected a number of hefty ancient volumes dealing with human art, went off to a cubicle in the Alien Section, and began thumbing through the pages of a book of modernist spacescapes. An hour later I had worked my way through about half the books when suddenly I came upon yet another portrait of Mr. Abercrombie's unknown woman.
    As always, she was dressed in black, and, as always, the exquisite regularity of her features was highlighted by an expression of infinite sorrow. I quickly checked the pertinent data and found that the portrait was completed on Earth in 1908 A.D., in a country called Uganda. The artist was a naturalist named Brian McGinnis, who was known primarily for the discovery of two rare species of orchid that grew on the slopes of a volcanic mountain; his only prior artwork had been a series of pastels of various orchids.
    The biographical sketch of McGinnis went on to say that he had been born in a country called Scotland, had received his education in botany and biology, had spent four years in the military, and had gone to Uganda, a wild and primitive land, at the age of twenty-eight. He published seventeen monographs, thirteen on orchids, three on local fauna, and one on volcanic formations, and died of an unknown disease at the age of thirty-six, in the year 1910 A.D.
    I have analyzed such data as I had been able to accumulate on the four artists, and I am still convinced that my theory is correct. If Jamal had indeed served in the military, it was the only thing they had in common, other than the fact that all four were human males who had each committed the same woman to canvas or hologram— and I am confident that when I access a Far London computer, it will confirm Jamal's military service.
    I then asked the library computer to determine the current whereabouts of the McGinnis painting, but again, it was unable to help me, nor could it give me any information concerning Reuben Venzia, a man about whom Mr. Abercrombie wants some information. In truth, I cannot understand why the people of Pico II have never bothered to upgrade their library computer.
    I finally went back to my room, prepared to contact Mr. Abercrombie and relate this new find to him, but the hotel's subspace tightbeam did not have the power to reach Far London, and the cost of patching the message through Zartaska and Gamma Leporis IX, the least complicated route, was so great that I decided to wait until I returned to Far London to inform him of my discovery.
    I spent the remainder of my time on Pico II in the library, examining every volume of artwork there in the hope of finding yet another rendering of Mr. Abercrombie's