Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 Read Free Page A

finished.
    “And his Legacy. ” Davout smiled. “There’s a three-week period in his life where he—well, he drops right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went—and who he was with, if anyone.”
    Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.
    “It’s a critical time for him,” Davout went on. “He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just died—realdeath, remember—and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my sympathies.” He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. “But my problem is that when he resurfaces, everything’s changed for him. In June, he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai conference in Paris, then vanished. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.”
    Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra . “How have you tried to locate him?”
    “Credit card records—they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in Paris. After that, he must have paid for everything with cash.”
    “He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?” Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on it. “Did you try passport records?”
     “But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport when crossing a border.”
    “Cash machines?”
    “Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple of days prior to the conference.”
    The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you need me, all right.”
     Davout flashed solemnly. “How much would it cost me?”
    Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.
    Davout frowned. “Sounds all right,” he said.
    Inwardly, Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike. “I’ll get busy, then.”
    Davout looked grateful. “You’ll be able to get on it right away?”
    “Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as possible, especially from around that period of time.”
    “I have them ready.”
    “Send away.”
    An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. she flashed. “I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.”
    At university, Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a profitable sideline for her. People—usually people connected with academe in one way or another—hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work—it gave her interesting sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.
    Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very good at this particular art.
    Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well: Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.
    The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné