The Planet on the Table by Kim Stanley Robinson Page A

person.
    So I dropped by her home near Plaza Dubrovnik one evening, to rouse her from her irresponsible indifference. When she answered the door there were paint smudges on her face and hands.
    “Freya,” I scolded her. “How could you take up an entirely new hobby when there is a
case
to be solved?”
    “Generously I allow you entrance after such a false accusation,” she said. “But you will have to eat your words.”
    She led me downstairs to her basement laboratory, which extended the entire length and breadth of her villa. There on a big white-topped table lay Heidi Van Seegeren’s Monet, looking like the three—dimensional geologic map of some minerally blessed country.
    “What’s this?” I exclaimed. “Why is this here?”
    “I believe it is a fake,” she said shortly, returning to a computer console.
    “Wait a moment!” I cried. On the table around the painting were rolls of recording chart paper, lab notebooks, and what looked like black-and-white photos of the painting. “What do you mean?”
    After tapping at the console she turned to me. “I mean, I believe it’s a fake”
    “But I thought art forgery was extinct. It is too easy to discover a fake.”
    “Ha!” She waved a finger at me angrily. “You pick a bad time to say so. It is a common opinion, of course, but not necessarily true.”
    I regarded the canvas more closely. “What makes you think this a fake? I thought it was judged a masterpiece of its period.”
    “Something you said first caused me to question it,” she said. “You mentioned that the painting seemed to have been created by an artist familiar with the light of Terminator. This seemed true to me, and it caused mc to reflect that one of the classic signs of a fake was anachronistic sensibility—that is to say, the forger injects into his vision of the past some element of his time that is so much a part of his sensibility that he cannot perceive it. Thus the Victorians faked Renaissance faces with a sentimentality that only they could not immediately see.”
    “I see.” I nodded sagely. “It did seem that cathedral had been struck with Solday light, didn’t it.”
    “Yes. The trouble is, I have been able to find no sign of forgery in the physical properties of the painting.” She shook her head. “And after three weeks of uninterrupted chemical analysis, that is beginning to worry me.”
    “But Freya,” I said, as something occurred to me. ‘Does all this have a bearing on the Musgrave murder?”
    “I think so,” she replied. “And if not, it is certainly more interesting. But I believe it does.”
    I nodded. “So what, exactly, have you found?”
    She smiled ironically. “You truly want to know? Well. The best test for anachronisms is the polonium 210, radium 226 equilibrium—”
    “Please, Freya. No jargon.”
    “Jargon!” She raised an eyebrow to scorn me. “There is no such thing. Intelligence is like mold in a petri dish—as it eats ever deeper into the agar of reality, language has to expand with it to describe what has been digested. Each specialty provides the new vocabulary for its area of feeding and gets accused of fabricating jargon by those who know no better. I’m surprised to bear such nonsense from you. Or perhaps not.”
    “Very well,” I said, hands up. “Still, you must communicate your meaning to me.”
    “I shall. First I analyzed the canvas. The material and its weave match the characteristics of the canvas made by the factory outside Paris that provided Monet throughout the painting of the Rouen cathedral series. Both the fabric and the glue appear very old, though there is no precise dating technique for them. And there was no trace of solvents that might have been used to strip paint off a genuine canvas of the period.
    “I then turned to the paint. Follow so far?” she asked sharply. “Paint?”
    “You may proceed without further sarcasm, unless unable to control yourself.”
    “The palette of an artist as famous