Forbidden Planets Read Free

flagstoned path to the structure, slipped within, and found Ilarios Warrigrove seated on a chair of black iron behind a table of the same material, sipping from a tall thin glass filled with a pale yellow liquid. A carafe of the stuff and another glass stood on a tray before him. “Would you care to?” he asked with a gesture that Imbry’s eye noted was calculatedly relaxed.
    “Why not?” the fat man said. He raised the glass, paused but a moment to inhale its delicate bouquet, then drained half of it at a gulp. “Excellent.”
    They exchanged the gestures and pleasantries suitable to a casual encounter and the time of day, but Imbry saw how Warrigrove’s eyes kept flickering sideways to the satchel that hung from his unoccupied hand. The formalities accomplished, he placed the container on the table and withdrew its cloth-wrapped contents.
    “Someone has asked me to sell this,” he said and whisked away the covering.
    Warrigrove could not restrain an intake of breath.
    “You know what it is,” Imbry said. He was adept at reading microexpressions and now saw Warrigrove consider, then reject, denial but opt for less than full disclosure, all in the time a tranquil man takes to blink.
    “I know what it might be,” he said. “I had heard—only a rumor—that such a thing might be on its way to Old Earth.”
    The aficionado spoke without taking his eyes from the scintillation. Imbry sensed that the man was unable to resist the attraction. For himself, he found that his annoyance at the thing’s importuning made it easier to look away. “What is it?” he asked.
    Imbry watched the patrician face closely while Warrigrove framed his answer, and was fairly sure that he was about to hear the truth.
    “A myth,” the man said, “or a chimera. An object of desire, longed for and sought after, though it may not truly exist.”
    The fat man made a gesture that expressed cynicism. “That sounds like precisely the kind of thing that a cunning forger would contrive to dangle before the avid appetite.”
    Warrigrove’s eyes did not leave the object. “Well, you would know,” he said.
    Imbry acknowledged the truth of the observation. More than a few alleged masterworks that hung or stood or scampered in the palaces of wealthy collectors had come from his own hand, though they bore the signatures and sigils of bygone geniuses.
    “Indeed,” Warrigrove continued, “if it is a fraud, you are precisely the kind of person one might expect to arrive asking, eyes wide with innocence, just what it might be.”
    “Let us assume, for the moment,” Imbry said, “that my innocence is genuine and that the item is what it is supposed to be—then what is it?”
    Warrigrove sighed. “You will think me needlessly obscure, but your question has no definite answer.”
    Imbry felt a twinge of annoyance. “We inhabit an impossibly ancient world,” he said. “Every question has long since been posed, in all its possible variants and permutations, and answered fully.”
    “That is supposedly the overarching reality of our age,” admitted Warrigrove. “But we may be dealing here with another reality.”
    “I am, as you have intimated, a manufacturer of ‘other realities,’ ” Imbry said. “Thus you may trust me when I tell you that no other reality exists.”
    “And yet you bring me this,” Warrigrove said. His long, pale fingers reached out and touched the thing on the table, stroked it, then drew back. “You must leave it with me.”
    “No.”
    “I must study it.”
    Imbry said, “I intend to hold an auction. But if you’d care to waive your fee for this consultation, you can be among the bidders.”
    Warrigrove agreed with an alacrity that surprised Imbry. The fat man covered the object with the dark cloth, evoking a low moan from the aficionado, who blinked as if awakening from a dream, then looked at Imbry with a puzzled expression. “You did that,” he said, “without effort. Does its glory not touch your inner