The Dark Lady

interested only in the subject herself. He has no interest in the portraits.”
    “No interest?” Abercrombie yelled. “He went to 350,000 credits for the Kilcullen painting, you lying, tiger-striped bastard!”
    “But he never had any intention of purchasing it,” I explained.
    “Just how gullible do I look to you?” demanded Abercrombie coldly.
    “He says that he was merely trying to... ”
    I suddenly realized that the screen was blank and I was talking into a deactivated vidphone. I checked to make sure that we hadn't been inadvertently disconnected, and then, experiencing a surprising sense of elation, I returned to the computer. I was unhappy that I had upset Abercrombie, of course, but I was also relieved that I would be able to continue my researches rather than have to go out to his house to explain in detail what I had learned. (Not that I couldn't have told him just as easily by vidphone or even computer, but he preferred to have his employees meet him in person, which made no sense to me at all, since once I appeared on his premises he usually ignored me for hours and then insisted that I cover everything we had to discuss in a brief sentence or two.)
    I spent the next three hours having the library computer check various sources for more information about Shareen d'Amato, but it was unable to add anything substantive, though it supplied me with a number of romantic legends concerning her ghost, which supposedly haunted the cemetery, greeting the shades of departed spacemen and offering them drink and sexual comfort on their way to the next life.
    Then, as I was about to leave the library to obtain nourishment, the computer came to life again.
    “In my continuing search for data, I have found a book containing material on Brian McGinnis,” it announced.
    “Where is it?” I asked.
    “In a small local library on Aguella VII.”
    “Aguella VII is not a human colony,” I said. “I wonder how a book about an African botanist came to be there?”
    “The book is not about McGinnis, but rather about the early days of Great Britain's colonization of Uganda,” replied the computer. “It was donated, along with 308 other volumes about Uganda, by Jora Nagata, a structural engineer of Ugandan ancestry who emigrated to Aguella VII in 2167 G.E. and worked on several projects as a consultant to the Aguellan government.”
    “Can I access the book?” I asked.
    “I have committed the pertinent sections to memory, and will reproduce them on the screen,” answered the computer.
    There followed some fifteen hundred words on McGinnis, whose primary claim to fame seemed to be that he occasionally displayed more bravery than intelligence in his dealings with the local fauna. Once, by the simple expedient of yelling and fluttering a white handkerchief in the wind, he diverted a stampeding herd of buffalo from a native village that he was visiting, and on numerous other occasions he went alone and unarmed into the jungle to observe the various carnivores. His discovery of the two new orchid species, one of which bore his name, was not even mentioned.
    “Is that all?” I asked when I had finished reading.
    “That is all the written text.”
    “You say that as if there's something else.”
    “There is a photograph of Brian McGinnis.”
    “Please let me see it.”
    Suddenly the screen was covered by a sepia-toned print of a young man, clad in short pants and short-sleeved shirt, his rifle cradled in his arms, a look of enormous pride on his bronzed face, standing with his foot on the neck of a large spotted cat which the caption said was believed to be a man-eater. There were four figures standing behind him: three were dark-skinned, obviously his assistants or colleagues. The fourth was pale-skinned, a woman, and I knew who it was before I ordered the computer to enlarge her image, since she alone was clad in black despite what I had read of the intense heat and sunlight that one encounters in Earth's equatorial zone.
    It was her. She had the same sad eyes, the same prominent cheekbones, even the same hair style.
    “Who is the woman?” I demanded.
    “I cannot answer that,” responded the computer. “There is no mention of her in the book, and she is not identified in the photograph.”
    “Do you recognize her?”
    “She is the subject of the portraits that you have been seeking.”
    “Why did you not tell me about this photograph?”
    “You specified that you were only interested in works of