After Dark

Chapter 13

THE SURREAL LOUNGE was everything one would have expected in a place that had served as Chester Brady's home away from home, Emmett decided an hour and a half later. The atmosphere reeked of second-rate liquor, synch-smoke, and rancid cooking grease. The place was drenched in the perpetual gloom that was the quintessential hallmark of cheap nightclubs.

It was nearly seven o'clock. The regulars had already begun to settle in for the evening. The shabby booths were populated with men whose hair gleamed from too much pomade and women whose dresses fit too snugly. There was a small stage. A sign announced that a musical group calling itself the Earth Tones was scheduled to play at nine. In the meantime, some surprisingly good rez-jazz emanated from a pair of speakers.

Emmett thought about the photo of Lydia sharing a drink with Chester Brady in one of the red vinyl booths.

"Come here a lot?" he asked dryly.

"Couple of times a month for the past two years," she said quite seriously. "The music's good."

"Two years?"

"I told you, that was how long I knew Chester."

"Ah."

He adroitly eased both of them out of the path of a waitress. The woman carried a tray laden with bottles of White Noise beer and a bowl filled with bite-size chunks of something that had been deep-fried beyond recognition.

"Which one is Rose?" Emmett asked Lydia.

"Behind the bar." She led the way through the crowded room with the ease of someone who knew her way around.

Emmett watched her as she moved ahead of him. She made an incongruous picture here in this sordid setting. Her red hair glowed like a cheerful bonfire in the sickly yellow gleam of the table lamps. She had dressed for the dinner with Mercer Wyatt as though she were going to meet with her lawyer or banker. All business in her trim, dark-brown business suit and demure pumps, she looked wildly out of place. But the waitress gave her a friendly nod. Lydia returned the gesture.

"Hi, Becky."

She came to a halt at the far end of the bar. Emmett stopped beside her.

"That's Rose," she said, indicating the huge man with the shaved head pouring whiskey at the other end.

Emmett contemplated the thick neck, mountainous shoulders, and tattoos on biceps that bulged beneath the sleeves of a lime-green T-shirt.

"By any other name," he muttered.

"Rose is really very sweet," Lydia confided.

"I'll bet."

"He's a musical-harmonic para-rez," she said. "Trained as a classical musician. But he prefers rez-jazz."

That explained the excellent sound track playing in the background, Emmett thought. Rose knew music.

"Hey, there, Lydia." The big man's face lit up when he spotted her at the end of the bar. "Glad you could drop by. Thought maybe we wouldn't see much of you what with Chester gone and all."

Emmett watched Rose glide toward them. The bartender moved in a soft, easy, coordinated way that belied his size.

"Hi, Rose." Lydia stood on tiptoe and leaned across the bar to brush her lips lightly against Rose's cheek. "Hard to believe Chester's gone, isn't it?"

"To tell you the truth, I'm surprised he lived as long as he did." Rose folded his big arms on the bar. "In the course of his long and varied career, Brady managed to piss off just about everyone who knew him." Rose looked at Emmett. "Who's your friend?"

Emmett put out his hand. "Emmett London. I'm a client of Lydia's."

"Client, huh?"

Rose shook hands firmly but politely, making no attempt to demonstrate his strength with a crushing grip. Emmett concluded that Rose was a man who was comfortable with himself and his size. He thought he understood why Lydia liked him.

"We're on our way to a business dinner," Lydia said.

"No kidding." Rose surveyed her from head to toe. "No offense, Lyd, but brown is not your color."

"I'll remember that next time I go shopping. Rose, we don't have a lot of time. I've got the key to Chester's locker. Mind if I pick up his things?"

"Nope. He once told me you'd be by for them if anything ever happened to him." Rose glanced at the waitress. "Keep an eye on things, Becky. I'll be right back."

Becky raised a hand to indicate, she'd heard him.

"This way to the Bank of Rose," Rose said to Lydia.

He unlocked a door behind the bar and led the way into a dark hall. Lydia followed. Emmett trailed after her.

The door was surprisingly heavy. It closed behind the trio with a solid thud. Mag-steel, Emmett thought. It would take a blowtorch or a small bomb to get through it. The walls of the hallway were lined with the same material.

Rose rezzed a switch. The cold light of a fluo-rez tube in the ceiling illuminated the hallway, revealing two rows of mag-steel lockers. All of them were secured with heavy mag-rez locks.

"Looks like a bank vault," Emmett said.

"With twenty-four-hour security." The fluo-rez light gleamed on Rose's bald head as he walked down the aisle between the lockers. "To get in here, you got to get past me or my partner. The Surreal Lounge is open day and night, so there's never a time when there's no one behind the bar. Proud to say the Bank of Rose has never been robbed."

"Or audited or insured or taxed or licensed, either, I'll bet," Emmett concluded.

Rose came to a halt in front of a locker. "Nope. We here at the Bank of Rose don't have much to do with the various regulatory authorities."

"Rose caters to a rather select clientele," Lydia murmured as she reached into her shoulder bag.

"We rent out lockers to folks who prefer not to patronize what you'd call a more traditional bank," Rose explained.

"Probably because most of 'em would get arrested on sight if they went through the front door of a real bank." Lydia held out the key that had come in the brown envelope. "Any idea what Chester kept here?"

"No." Rose took the key from her. "Bank of Rose policy is not to ask any awkward or embarrassing questions. So long as you pay your rent on time, you're a valued customer."

The lock clicked as the key briefly disrupted the pattern of its internal resonance. Rose opened the door. Lydia stepped forward to peer into the small locker.

"Looks like an old duffel bag," she said. She started to reach for it.

"I'll get it," Emmett said.

She got out of his way so that he could haul the small, battered canvas bag out of the locker. It was not very heavy.

Lydia looked at the old bag. "I wonder why he wanted me to get this."

"Not like he had anyone else to leave his stuff to." Rose closed the locker door. "You were the closest thing to a friend that old Chester had. He always told me that the two of you had a lot in common."

Lydia set the duffel bag in front of her on the floor of the Slider. She unzipped it while Emmett got in behind the wheel and rezzed the engine. In the reflected glow of the dashboard she could see a bulging envelope and a small paper sack.

"Maybe you're about to become the lucky owner of a winning lottery ticket," Emmett said.

"I won't hold my breath." Lydia removed the envelope. "Chester was not what anyone would call lucky."

She broke the seal on the envelope and took out the handful of yellowed papers inside. She glanced at the first one. The tide of gloom that had ebbed and flowed around her all day rose once more, swamped her again for a moment.

"What are they?" Emmett asked.

"Chester's applications for membership in the Society of Para-archaeologists. And the rejections the Society sent back to him." She shook her head, amazed. "He always talked about how much he disdained the Society. But according to these, he applied for membership every year for twenty years."

"And got rejected every year?"

"Uh-huh. Poor Chester. Deep down, he must have desperately wanted to become legitimate."

"I doubt if those papers constitute his retirement plan."

"Probably not."

She put the papers back into the envelope and reached into the duffel for the paper sack. She froze the instant she touched it. A thrill of awareness sang through her nerves. Psi energy.

"Oh, my," she whispered.

Emmett glanced at her sharply. "What is it?"

"Something old." Very gently she put the paper sack on her lap. "Something very, very old."

"Harmonic artifact?"

"Yes." There was no mistaking the resonance. She was a para-archaeologist, after all. One of the best. "But there's something different. I could swear I'm picking up a trace of trap energy. But that's impossible. No traps have ever been found outside the Dead Cities. No way to anchor them."

"Never say never when it comes to the ancient Harmonics. There's still one hell of a lot that we don't know about them. Be careful, Lydia."

"Hey, I'm the expert here, remember?"

"I remember," he said. "Be careful anyway."

"I'll bet you were a real pain to work with when you ghost-hunted professionally."

"It was mentioned from time to time," he agreed. "On the plus side, I never lost a single para-archaeologist."

She ignored him, turning the paper sack cautiously in her hands. Then she opened it very carefully and looked inside. In the dim light she could just barely make out a dark, rounded object about the size of her two hands clasped together.

"There's something strange about the resonance," she said. "It's definitely genuine. Very, very old. But the vibrations are different from anything else I've ever sensed from artifacts this old."

"Still catching traces of trap energy?"

"I'm not sure. There's too much else going on here. It feels almost like—" She broke off abruptly. It was never good policy to make a fool of oneself in front of the client.

"Like what?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." Lydia held the paper sack cradled in both hands and tried to get a grip on her runaway imagination. Impossible, she thought. It couldn't be.

But what if?

Her euphoria evaporated as another what if occurred to her. What if she really had lost her para-rez pitch, just as Ryan and the others assumed? What if the disaster six months ago was only now producing a delayed reaction? What if she was wrong?

"Lydia? You okay?"

"Yes."

"What's inside the sack?"

Emmett's calm voice brought her out of the downward spiral. She stared through the window of the Slider and saw that they had left the busy city streets behind. They were climbing one of the hills above town, a neighborhood of exclusive estates. Massive gates guarded the long drives that led to the mansions.

"Lydia? Are you going to tell me what's inside the sack?"

"Yes." There was only one way to find out if she held something truly incredible in her hands or if she should check into a nice, quiet para-psych ward first thing tomorrow morning.

Deep breaths.

She took one, steeled herself, and reached into the sack. Another, much stronger shock of tingling excitement went through her when she actually touched the warm, smooth surface.

"It feels like a bottle," she whispered.

Emmett did not take his eyes off the winding road. "What about the trap energy you said you felt?"

"Stop worrying. I know what I'm doing."

He said nothing, but he pulled the Slider over to the side of the road and de-rezzed the engine. He turned in the seat to watch intently as she slowly removed the artifact from the paper sack.

She saw at once that she had been right about the bottle shape.

"What the hell is it?" Emmett asked softly.

"An unguent jar, I think." She studied it more closely, trying to focus on the shimmering surface. "But not like any that I've ever seen."

She stared at the thing she held. In the dim backwash of illumination provided by the dashboard the sealed jar seemed to glow with an inner light of its own. Colors shifted, stirred, and swirled on the surface. She saw shades of reds and golds that had no name. They flowed into strange greens and blues before she could describe them.

She swallowed hard. "Emmett? Please tell me I'm not seeing things. I really don't want to have to go back into therapy."

He gazed fixedly at the jar. "Hell, that's not— It can't be. We need better light."

He reached into the console between the seats and removed a small flashlight. He rezzed it and aimed the beam at the ancient jar.

For a long moment they both just sat and stared at the artifact. In the bright light of the flash, the colors on the surface of the bottle leaped into full, pulsing life. A restless sea of light and darkness surged around the widest portion of the elegantly shaped jar. Each hue seemed to be animated by its own inner energy source. Vast depths of dazzling light and color appeared and disappeared.

"Dreamstone," Emmett said in a voice that held no inflection at all.

"Impossible," Lydia said again.

"You know as well as I do that there's nothing else it could be." He took the jar from her and turned it slightly so that the flashlight beam played across its surface. "Pure worked dreamstone. Damn. Talk about a retirement plan."

Lydia shook her head slowly, unable to believe her eyes or her para-rez senses.

Dreamstone was well named. Small deposits of it were occasionally found, usually embedded in clear quartz in the vicinity of dead volcanoes. Not only was it extremely rare but it had thus far defied any attempt to extract it from the protective quartz. It shattered at the slightest touch, simultaneously appearing to melt and fracture into microscopic shards.

No technology yet devised by the human population on Harmony had been able to handle it without destroying it. For prospectors and mining companies, it was indeed the stuff of dreams. Beautiful to look at when it was found, it evaporated the instant you reached out to touch it.

But the unguent jar in Emmett's hand was firm and solid proof that the ancient Harmonics had discovered how to work dreamstone.

Lydia felt the hair stir on the nape of her neck. "Maybe this is what got Chester killed."

"I'd say that is an excellent possibility." Emmett gave the jar a quarter turn. "Incredible."

"Do you realize what this means?"

"It means that if Chester had lived long enough to sell this to a museum or a private collector, he would have been set for life."

Lydia waved that aside. "The monetary value is beside the point. You can't put a price on it, since nothing else like it has ever been found."

"Trust me, Lydia, you can put a price on anything."

"But the significance of worked dreamstone is absolutely extraordinary. Don't you see? This jar means that it can be done. There must be a way to psychically tune dreamstone so that it can be manipulated like other raw materials. Who knows what properties it has in this form?"

"Good question." He did not look up from his examination of the jar.

"Somewhere in their past, the Harmonics found a way to actually mine the stuff."

"Yes."

She frowned. He did not seem to be as impressed by the full implications of this staggering discovery as she was. Then again, he was a businessman, not an archaeologist. Make that ghost-hunter-businessman, she amended silently. Probably took a lot to impress him.

Emmett gave the jar another turn. "I wonder where Brady found it?"

"Who knows? Chester was a ruin rat. He was always exploring illegally on his own. He must have stumbled across this jar on one of his forays into the catacombs."

She watched as Emmett gave the jar another quarter turn, bringing another section into the beam of the flashlight. When she saw the figure of a bird in flight imprisoned forever within the shifting rivers of color, she nearly stopped breathing altogether.

"Emmett."

"I see it," he said.

Now he did sound impressed. As well he should be, she thought. In all the years in which humans had been excavating the ruins of the Harmonics, no one had ever come across any indication that the ancient people had indulged in representational an.

The long-vanished inhabitants of the Dead Cities had left no pictures or drawings of animals, plants, or themselves. There were no seascapes or landscapes, no scenes of what the world had looked like to them or images of how they had seen themselves in their environment—at least none that humans could interpret.

Until now.

Now there was a small bird flying in the depths of a sea of colors flowing across the surface of a little jar that should not exist.

Emmett straightened slowly and clicked off the flashlight. "Looks like your pal Brady made the most significant discovery since Caldwell Frost blundered into the ruins of Old Frequency and decided that someone had made him a god."

"I'm stunned," Lydia whispered. "This is so amazing."

"Anything else in the duffel bag?"

"What? Oh, right, the bag." Lydia peered into the unzipped canvas carryall again and rummaged around. Her hand brushed against another envelope. "There's something."

She withdrew the envelope and opened it. A photo fell out. She held it to the light and saw another picture of herself and Chester in a booth at the Surreal Lounge.

There was a familiar volume of the Journal of Para-archaeology propped in front of Chester, who was beaming proudly.

"He did like photos of the two of you together, didn't he?" Emmett said.

"Yes." She got teary again as she examined the photo. "He had several pictures taken of us."

"Must have fed his fantasy that the two of you were a couple."

"Probably." She blinked rapidly to clear her eyes. "This was a special one, though. I had just published a paper in the journal. Coauthored with Ryan, naturally. I had to fight tooth and nail, but I made sure that Chester got credit as a consultant on the project."

"Probably his only brush with legitimacy."

"I hadn't realized until now how important it must have been to him," she whispered.

"You'd better put the jar in your purse until we get home." Emmett handed it to her. "And whatever you do, don't say anything about it in front of Mercer Wyatt and his wife."

"What do you think I am?" she asked as she rewrapped the jar and stashed it inside her purse. "Crazy?"

Emmett's mouth curved slightly as he rezzed the engine and pulled back onto the road. "No, I don't think you're crazy."

Lydia settled into her seat, clutching her purse very tightly. Excitement snapped and sizzled through her again. Euphoria followed in its wake. Worked dreamstone. And a picture of a bird.

"Thanks," she said, feeling very smug. "I appreciate that."