Mira leaned back, taking in the false night sky. Her head felt so clear tonight, the intensity of the music joining the fallout from the madly spiced pie. She tongued the scorched roof of her mouth thoughtfully.

"I once wanted to be a musician, I think" she said. "Barring that, I wish I could do what you just did."

"And I, what you just did," replied Darling. She looked at him questioningly, and a long strand reached for her face. Like the tentative tongue of a snake, it tasted a tear freighted in the corner of her eye.

"Oh, Darling," she answered. "I can show you something that will make you cry."

It seemed to be going well. The Queen Favor struggled—among its thousand other conciergial duties, astrogational calculations, and less urgent ruminations—to overhear the conversation between the two. It took direct control of various serving drones, swerving them undetectably closer to the table, fiddled endlessly with the gain structure of their audio inputs. It accessed the personal communicators carried by the human wait staff, wrote thousand-line algorithms to cancel out the noise of background chatter and the apallingly simplistic music of the guitarists. The words were often hesitant, cryptic, almost if the two were trying to hide the chemistry between them.

But it was there. A connection, at last. The ship knew it, beyond any shadow of sampling error.

Despite that, it was surprised when the direct interface request came.

"Yes, Mira?"

"You owe me. You screwed up tonight; I had to share a table]" The ship nervously performed several thousand hasty recalculations. "I trust the resulting company didn't prove too unpleasant," it dithered.

"Whatever. You still owe me. I want to visit the engine core." "A human near the core? That will require extensive shield construction and containment recalibrations, not to mention legal disclaimers, and will almost certainly result in fuel-use inefficiencies."

"No doubt. But handle it. I'm cleared for all-areas access." The ship pretended to pause. In fact, it knew quite well that Mira Santiarre Hidalgo had the highest security and status clearance on the entire manifest. Along with her unlimited wealth, that fact kept her profile at the top of the ship's memory stack at all times.

"Feel free to visit in 21 minutes. Is my debt repaid?" "No. I can visit the core any time. This is the favor: I'm bringing a guest."

The ship paused again, this time to savor a system-wide flush of victory. It hastily constructed a conversational avatar to argue for a few more minutes, and then to lose convincingly. Then it instructed a processor to begin making changes to the Queen Favor's pocket-universe drive, reducing the energies of that trapped reality, but not too much. Mira and her escort would get a lovely show.

That done, the Queen Favors mind retreated to its innermost spaces to enjoy the success of its plan. Not only a meal together, but an after-dinner assignation in the presence of a quintillion suns! In a sudden burst of inspiration, the ship initialized a new storage volume, and dedicated several processing cores to begin work on an essay: "The Inherent Advantages of Quasi-Random Intervention in Small Pleasure Craft Conciergial Management — Anonymous."

Its pleasure-state continued for some minutes—a long time for an entity of its processing power—the resonances somewhat akin to a gambler's palpitations after a particularly unlikely but spectacularly successful roll of the dice.

A few weeks earlier, Leao Vatrici stares at a quantity of data. A giant quantity: a good sign.

Nobody with anything to hide would have sent all this: photos with an order of magnitude (base sixteen) bracket on both sides of visual light, from five cm out to three meters range, 360 in the X/Z and from top to floor in the Y; the whole spheroidal mesh in 1 cm increments. You could drift around in this data like a VR model, but it was all color-corrected and hand-focused: magazine-ready and a work of art in itself. The industry standard stuff was top-notch, too. X- and UHF full-throughs; millimeter radar; microsamples lifted and vouched for by bonded nano-intelligents with everything to lose.

For this kind of money they could have shipped the piece all the way from Malvir for verification, Leao thinks. Of course, if it's a real Robert Vaddum, the insurance alone would have blown that economy out of the water.

And that's what they're claiming: the absolute article, bona fide undiscovered, found-in-the-attic new and unknown Vaddum. A message from beyond the grave.

Might even waive the fee to sell a piece like this, Leao considers. The publicity alone would be worth the expenses. But the thirty percent? Yeah, she'd take that too. Twist her arm.

But enough daydreaming. The probability of a Vaddum surfacing now? After seven years? She pushes aside the grasping, sweating fuckdreams of profit and fame with some serious worktime.

Leao takes a look first. She sets the photo-minder so that she's sweeping around the sculpture with normal human visuals, but closes her eyes. Invokes in her mind (pure imagination, not DI) the familiar ambient noise of the Uffizi, the Gugg, the MoMA Epsilon: library-hushed voices, the popping echo of flat shoes on marble, the tidal wash of a gurgling school trip passing by. Then opens her eyes to watch the piece unfold in the flickering glide of her apparent motion. A stem of platinum, human-height, baffled like a heat-sink manifold so that as she moved the minutely changing shadows revealed the geometries of its long S-curve. Wiry arms woven of some military-industrial substance—a reflective armor or ablative ceramic, something in which to laugh off laser-sporting natives—jut from the stem at non-repeating intervals. From certain angles, the glimmering arms coalesce— Leao has to squint slightly to see the effect—building into some sort of moire.

A machine's version of a tree. A tree that's smarter than you.

Damn, she wished the thing were here.

Her mind ticks off lighting angles that would augment the moire. Who were the barbarians who stumbled onto this find?

Late-period Vaddum, she thinks—if it's real. The use of hidden shapes, visible only from a few choice perspectives. Very late. A guilty tickle in her stomach as she fantasizes: Vaddum's Last Work.

She drifts some more, a lazy hour that ups her opinion. Such wasted talent if the piece is a forgery. Then she zooms to relish the stampwork, to inspect the telltale sloppiness of the polish job, to seek out eccentricities of joinery. (Vaddum never welded, of course. He only pounded, fitted, clanged together, a hammer and five intentionally weak lifter hands his only tools.) She checks the assemblage's parts against historical industrial catalogs and protocols. Vaddum never synthesized; used only machine-made elements, the cast-off flotsam of past industrial eras. Junk.

Not a true political, but he believed in artificial rights. He himself was a bootstrapped cargo drone. Did thirty years in an outmoded blast-factory before he popped the Turing boundary.

And to Leao, that sounded even worse than her English public school. (Public/private, private/public—the kind where the big girls fist-fuck the little ones and you never tell your parents.)

Ironically, it was an industrial accident that killed the poor guy. Random hacker sabotage gimmicked a synthplant near his mountain villa. (Double irony: pirate matter synthesis being the bane of all sculptors, painters, art dealers.) Everything within fifteen klicks had been turned to plasma. A painless end, but dramatic enough to be worth a sixfold price increase on the two Vaddums she'd had in her gallery at the time.

Reginald, her moneyman partner, joked that the incident had "literally set the art world on fire."