Seeker Read Online Free PDF Page B

me.”
    “Your boyfriend.”
    “My
ex
-boyfriend.”
Her eyes narrowed, and I could see things had come to a bad end. She was trying to turn whatever remained of the relationship into cash.
“He saw me admiring it one time so he told me I could have it.”
    “Good of him,” I said.
    “I liked the eagle.”
She stared at it for a long moment.
“He gave it to me the night before we broke up. I guess it was supposed to be a consolation prize.”
    “Maybe.”
    “The cup’s worth more than he is.”
She smiled. One of those smiles that tell you she wouldn’t feel especially upset if the boyfriend fell off a bridge.
    “Where did
he
get it?”
    “He always had it.”
    I could see I wasn’t going to get far with her. I was tempted to tell her what I believed, that the cup was worthless. But Rainbow has a code of ethics that requires me to know what I’m talking about. I fell back on our AI. “Jacob,” I said. “What’s the language?”
    “Searching,”
he said.
    There was really nothing outré about the cup, nothing to set it apart, aside from the strange symbols. But I’d seen a lot of odd lettering during my years with Rainbow, and, believe me, it didn’t necessarily mean anything.
    Jacob made a sound as if clearing his throat. It signaled he was surprised. Had Amy Kolmer not been on the circuit, I knew he would have made an appearance of his own. “
It’s English
,” he said. “
Mid-American
.”
    “Really?”
    “Of course.”
    “Fourth Millennium,” I guessed.
    “Third. Nobody spoke English in the Fourth.”
    Amy came to life. She’d not expected any good news from me. But she’d overheard enough to raise her hopes. She looked at the cup, looked at me, looked back at the cup. “
This thing is nine thousand years old
?”
    “Probably not. The inscription uses an old language. That doesn’t mean—”
    “Hard to believe,”
she said.
“It’s in good shape for all those years.”
    “Amy,” I said, “why don’t you bring the cup over here? Let us take a close look at it?”
     
     
    The truth is that Jacob can give us all the physical details remotely. But Alex insists that a computer-generated repro is not the same as holding the actual object in his hands. He likes to imply there’s a spiritual dimension to what he does, although if you ask him point-blank he’d say it was all nonsense, but that there are qualities in a physical object that computers cannot measure. Don’t ask him to specify.
    So I made the appointment with Amy Kolmer for that afternoon. She showed up early. Alex came down and ushered her into the office personally. His curiosity had been piqued.
    I didn’t particularly care for the woman. On the circuit, I’d sensed that she expected me to try to cheat her. In person, she went a different direction, playing the helpless but very sexual female. I suppose it was Alex’s presence that set her off. She fluttered and primped and cast her eyes to the floor.
Poor me, life is hard but maybe I’ve gotten lucky and I surely would be grateful for whatever assistance you can lend
. If she thought Rainbow’s asking price to broker a transaction would go down as a result of her efforts, she didn’t know Alex.
    She’d wrapped the cup in a piece of soft linen and carried it in a plastic bag. When we were all seated inside the office, she opened the bag, unwrapped the cup, and set it before him.
    He studied it closely, bit his lip, made faces, and placed it on Jacob’s bulk reader. “What can you tell us, Jacob?” he asked.
    The lamp in the top of the reader blinked on. Turned amber. Turned red. Dimmed and intensified. Went pretty much through the spectrum. The process took about two minutes.
    “The object is made of acryolonitrile-butadiene-styrene resins. Coloring is principally—”
    “—Jacob,” said Alex, “how old is it?”
    “I would say the object was constructed during the Third Millennium. Best estimate is approximately 2600
C.E.
Error range two hundred years