2017

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-four books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her most recent work is Terran Tomorrow (Tor), the final book in her Yesterday’s Kin trilogy. Kress’s fiction has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Tao Toolbox. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

EVERY HOUR OF LIGHT AND DARK

Nancy Kress

1668

Delft, shrouded in rain, was uniformly gray. Hunched against the cold and wet, the artist walked from Oude Langendijk along the canal to his patron’s house. Much as he hated this sort of occasion, inside the house would be warmth, food, wine. And quiet. His own house, crowded with children, was never quiet.

“You are welcome,” said his patron’s wife shyly as a servant took his cloak. “Pieter will be glad to see you.”

Johannes doubted that. This celebration was not about him, nor one of his paintings, nor even the newly acquired Maes painting being shown for the first time. This celebration was about the patron: his wealth, his taste, his power. Johannes smiled at his pretty wife, another acquisition, and passed into the first of many lavishly furnished rooms, all warm from good fires.

In this room hung one of his own paintings. Johannes glanced at it in passing, then stopped abruptly. His eyes widened. He took a candle from a table and held it close to the picture. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet—he had painted it four years ago. Catharina had been the model. She sat, heavily pregnant, on a wooden chair, the light from an unseen window illuminating the top of her fair hair as she bent over her work. A broken toy lay at her feet, and what could be seen of her expression was somber. On the table beside her were her work basket, a glass of wine, and a pearl necklace, tossed carelessly as if she had thrown it off in discomfort, or despair. On the wall behind her was a painting-within-a-painting, van Honthorst’s Lute Player.The painstaking detail in the smaller picture, the hint of underpainted blue in Catharina’s burgundy-colored dress, the warm light on the whitewashed walls—how long it took to get that right!—all shone in the glow from Johannes’s candle.

But he had not made this painting.

Inch by inch, he examined it, ignoring guests who passed him, spoke to him. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet was the most skillful forgery he had ever seen, but forgery it was. Did Pieter know? Presumably not, or the picture would not still be on the patron’s walls. How had it come there? Who had painted it? And—

What should Johannes do about this?

The decision came swiftly—he should do nothing. He owed money all over the city. He had hopes of Pieter’s commissioning another painting from him soon, perhaps tonight. The original could not have been switched with the forgery without Pieter’s consent, not in this well-guarded house, and Pieter would not welcome attention drawn to whatever scheme he was participating in. Say nothing.

“Ah, Johannes!” said a booming voice behind him. “Admiring your own work, you vain man?”

Johannes turned to face the guest of honor, Nicolaes Maes. “No,” he said. Maes waited, but Johannes said nothing more.

Not now, not ever.

2270

Cran is working on clearances at his console when Tulia bounces into the Project room. “Cran! They chose it! They really chose it!” She grabs his hands and twirls him in circles.

“CarefUl! You’ll hit the Squares!”

She stops moving and drops Cran’s hands. He hears his own tone: sour, disapproving, a cranky old man. He sees that Tulia understands immediately, but understanding isn’t enough to erase the hurt. Torn between them, she chooses hurt.

“Aren’t you happy for me?”

“Of course I am,” he says, and forces a smile. And he is happy, in a way. How could he not be—Tulia is him, or at least 32 percent of her genes are. It’s the other 68 percent that prompts this terrible, inexcusable jealousy.

She says softly, “Maybe next cycle the Gallery will choose one of your pictures.”

It is the wrong thing to say; they both know that will never happen. Cran does not have Tulia’s talent, has perhaps no talent at all. How does she do it, produce art that is somehow fresh and arresting, after working all day at the Project’s forgeries? How? Sometimes he hates her for it. Does she know this?

Sometimes he loves her for it. She knows this.

Cran says, “I am happy for you. But I need to work.”

Her eyes sharpen. She, after all, is also part of the Project. “Do you have something?”

“An ancient Egyptian vase, on Square Three. Go look.”

She looks, frowning. “We cannot reproduce that.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s inside a tomb. We can Transfer a lump of rock and no one would ever know.”

We could Transfer one ofmy sculptures, which are just as dreadful as my paintings.

“The tomb was never opened before—”

“No.” No one ever names the Madness, if naming can be avoided. Even in a deliberately rational society—legally rational, culturally rational, genetically rational to whatever extent the geneticists can manage—superstitions seep in like moondust in airlocks. No one says the word aloud.

“Well, that’s wonderful!” Tulia says. “Has the Director vetted it? Have you done the clearances?”

“Yes, he did, and I’m completing them now. When . . . when is your Gallery presentation?”

“Tuesday. I’ll go now. I just wanted to tell you about . . . about my painting.”

“I’m glad you did,” Cran says, lying, hoping she doesn’t realize that. Sixty-eight percent foreign genes.

Tulia leaves. Cran de-opaques the window wall and stares out. The Project is housed in its own dome, and sometimes the bleak lunar landscape calms him when he feels equally bleak. Not, however, this time.

On the horizon, the lights of Alpha Dome are just visible below stars in the black sky. Alpha was the first, the only dome to exist when the Madness happened on Earth. Six thousand lunar colonists, half of them scientists. They had the best equipment, the best scientific minds, the best planners. Earth had those who could not qualify; Earth had too many people and too many wars; Earth had the ability to create genetically boosted bioweapons so powerful that when the Madness began as just another war, it quickly escalated. In three months everyone on Earth was dead. How could they do that, those Terrans of two centuries ago? Those on Alpha watched in horror. There was nothing they could do except what they did: shoot down both incoming missiles and incoming, infected escapees.

He was not there, of course. He’s old, but not that old. How long does it take for guilt to evaporate? Longer than two hundred years. Alpha Dome grew to sixteen more domes. If he squints hard, he might be able to see the robots constructing Sigma Dome on the western horizon, or the sprays of dirt thrown up from the borers digging the connecting tunnels. But through all the construction, all the genetic tinkering, all the amazing scientific progress, the guilt has not gone away. We humans murdered our own species. Thus, the Project.

Or perhaps, Cran thinks, that’s wrong. There is, after all, a strong but polite political faction—all Luna’s political factions are polite, or else they don’t exist—that says the Project should be discontinued and its resources committed to the present and the future, not to rescuing the past. So far, this has not happened.

It takes Cran nearly an hour to finish the complicated clearance procedures for the Egyptian vase. He finds it hard to concentrate.

The clearances are approved almost immediately. They are, after all, only a formality; the Director, who is the Project’s expert on art of the ancient world, has already inspected the image glowing in Square Three. Cran has worked a long day and it’s late; he should go home. But he likes working alone at night, and he has the seniority to do so. He gazes at the vase, this exquisite thing that exists in dark beneath tons of rock in a buried tomb a quarter-million miles and three millennia away. A core-formed glass vessel, three inches high, its graceful, elaborately decorated curves once held perfumed ointment or scented oils. Perhaps it still does.

The Project room is lined with Squares, each a six-foot cube. Some of the Squares are solid real-time alloys; some are virtual simulations; some are not actually there at all—not in time or space. The Project is built on chaos theory, which says that the patterns of spacetime contain something called “strange attractors,” a mathematical concept that Cran doesn’t understand at all. He is, after all, a Project technician, not a physicist. A senior, trusted technician who will never be an artist.

Why Tulia? Why not me?

One of those questions that, like the Madness, has no answer.

2018

The guard at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., made his early morning rounds. He unlocked each room, peered in, and moved on. He had worked there a long while and prided himself on knowing exactly what each exhibit held at any given time.

He unlocked a gallery, glanced in, and stopped cold.

Not possible.

This room held the Gallery’s five Vermeers. At present, two were on loan. The other three should be on the off-white walls in their protected frames. They were.

But—

“Oh my God,” the guard said under his breath, and then very loudly. His hands shook as he pressed the alarm on his pager.

2270

The Transfer happens, as always, blindingly fast. One moment Square Three holds a small stone. The next it holds a delicate purple vase trimmed in gold.

Cran doesn’t touch it. He follows protocol and calls two members of the Handler Staff. Despite the hour, they both rush to the Project room. Marbet Hammerling’s eyes water, an extravagance that Cran deplores even as he understands it.

Salvaging anything from the past is a slow, difficult, emotional triumph. Humanity’s artistic heritage lay decaying on a deserted and contaminated Earth; nothing can be brought from the present without bringing contamination with it. But thanks to the genius of the Rahvoli Equations and the engineers who translated them to reality, some things can be saved from the past. Only things less than six cubic feet; only things deemed worthy of the huge expenditure of energy; only things non-living; only things replaced in Transfer by a rough equivalent in weight and size; only replacements that will not change the course of the timestream that has already unfolded. Otherwise, the Transfer simply did not happen. The past could only be disturbed so much.

Marbet whispers, “It is so beautiful.” Reverently she lifts it from the faint shimmer of the Square.

Cran is permitted to touch it with one finger, briefly. Only that. The vase will go into the Gallery and thousands will come to view and glory in this rightful human inheritance.

The Handlers bear away the vase. Cran paces the Project room. It’s well into the artificial lunar night; the lights of Alpha Dome have dimmed on the horizon. Cran can’t sleep; it’s been several nights since he slept. He’s old, but it isn’t that. Desire consumes him, the desire of a young man: not for sex, but for glory. Once, he thought he would be a great artist. Long ago reality killed the dream but not the gnawing disappointment, eating at his innards, his brain, his heart.

Tulia has a painting chosen for the Gallery.

His own work is shit, has always been shit, will always be shit.

Tulia, people are beginning to say, is the real thing. A genuine artist, the kind that comes along once in a generation.

Cran can’t sit still, can’t sleep, can’t lift himself, yet again, from the black pit into which he falls so often. Only one thing helps, and he has long since gotten past any qualms about its legality.

He takes the pill and waits. Ten minutes later nothing matters so much, not even his inadequacy. His brain has been temporarily rewired. Nothing works optimally, either, including his hands and his brain, both of which tremble. Small price to pay. The gnawing grows less, the pit retreats.

A flash of color catches his eye. Square Two lights up. The endlessly scanning Project has found something.

2018

“How?” James Glenwood said. And then, “Is anything missing?”

Of the National’s five Vermeers, Girl with a Flute and Girl with the Red Hat were on loan to the Frick in New York. Woman Holding a Balance and Lady Writing both hung on the walls. So did Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet.Below that, propped against the wall in a room locked all night, sat its duplicate.

A fake, of course—but how the hell did it get there?

The guard looked guilty. But Henry had worked for the museum for twenty-five years. And naturally he looked upset—suspicion was bound to fall on him as the person who locked this room last night and opened it this morning. Glenwood, a curator for thirty years, remembered well the 1990 brazen theft of Vermeer’s The Concert from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The picture had never been recovered.

Except this was not a theft. A prank? A warning of thefts to come—Look how easily I can break into this place?

Every other room in the National would now have to be meticulously checked, and every work of art. Security would have to be reviewed. The police must be called, and the Director. The curator pulled out his phone.

Only—

Phone in hand, he knelt in front of the painting that had so mysteriously appeared. Glenwood had studied seventeenth-century art his entire life. He had thousands and thousands of hours of experience, honed to an intuition that had often proved more correct than reason. He studied the picture propped against the wall, and then the one above it. His cell hung limply at his side, and a deep line crinkled his forehead.

Something here was not right.

2270

Cran has never seen anything like the picture whose image floats in Square Two.

The Squares seems to capture more three-dimensional objects than paintings, and only eleven have been Transferred since the Project began. Three Picassos, two medieval pictures that ignore perspective, two “abstracts” that seem to him nothing but blobs of paint, a Monet, a Renoir, a Takashi Murakami, and a faded triptych from some Italian church. None of them are like this.

The light! It falls on the figure, a woman bent over some sort of sewing. It glows on her burgundy gown, on the walls, on a pearl necklace lying on a table. Almost it outshines the soft glow of the Square itself. The woman seems sad, and so real that she makes Cran’s heart ache.

He stares at the picture for a long time, his mind befuddled by the drug he’s taken but his heart loud and clear. He must have this picture.

Not the Gallery. Him. For himself.

Not possible.

Unless . . .

He stumbles to his console and says, “Forgeries by Tulia Anson, complete catalogue, visual, at ten-second intervals.”

The screen—not a Square, just a normal holoscreen—flashes the forgeries that Tulia has completed so far. Each awaits a Square’s tracking the original somewhere in time. The catalogue is not random; curators and physicists have collaborated to estimate what periods and artworks have the greatest chance of appearing in the Squares. Cran does not, and has never tried to, understand the equations involved, those mysterious mathematical convolutions that make strange attractors out of chaos. He only knows that these are the pictures most likely to appear.

Several landscapes in various styles appear and disappear on the screen. Some portraits. More hideous abstracts. Tulia, the Project’s best forger, works hard, and quickly. A bunch of still lifes, with and without fruit. And then—

“Stop catalogue!”

There it is. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet, by Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer, 1664. What a mundane name for such perfection. Cran knows this woman, knows her from the sad tilt of her head, the bonnet she sews for her unborn child, the broken toy at her feet, the pearl necklace she has flung off. He is sure that her unseen eyes are filled with tears. She is deeply unhappy; her life has not turned out as she hoped. Cran knows her. He is her.

How many pills did he take?

No matter. This is his painting, meant for him. And Tulia, who is 32

percent his genes, has completed a superb forgery. That, too, proves that what he is going to do was meant to be.

Yes.

He does not bother with clearances. Actually, he cannot. There must be no traces. Clean and quick. The universe, which has denied him so much, owes him this.

The Vermeer hangs on the silk-covered wall of what looks in the Square like a private house, although it’s hard to be certain. Vermeer’s house? A patron? It doesn’t matter. Cran works quickly, calling for a ‘bot to bring Tulia’s painting from storage, erasing the ‘bot’s memory record, hoisting the forgery into the Square. Setting the controls. His hands fumble in their eagerness. It all must be done manually, to leave no record.

He makes the Transfer.

Tulia’s forgery vanishes. Nothing appears in Square Two.

Nothing.

“No!”

Data flashes on the console below the Square. A mechanical voice says calmly, “Error. Error. Transfer malfunction.”

And then, “Danger. Deactivate this Square.”

“No!” Cran gasps, unable to breathe. The Square blinks on and off, as he has never seen a Square blink before. But he knows what this means; spacetime is being affected in what could be a permanent way if the Square is not deactivated immediately. Fingers trembling, he enters and speaks the commands.

The Square goes dark.

The console data still glows. Cran stares at it. He shakes his head.

TRANSFER 653

Transfer Date: Saturday, Decade 28, 2270

Transfer to Past:

Planned Transfer: From present to March 16, 1668

Achieved Transfer: From present to March 16, 1668

Status: Transfer Successful

Transfer to Present:

Planned Transfer: From March 16, 1668 to present

Achieved Transfer: From March 16, 1668 to Unknown Time

Status: Transfer failed

Reason for Failure: Incomplete Data Entry (Clearances 60-75)

Cran wills the data holo to change, to say something else. It does not. Because he did not complete the clearances, which were not merely the stupid bureaucracy he had assumed, the Transfer has failed. Tulia’s forgery has gone to 1668, replacing the original on some silk-covered wall. The real Vermeer has not come all the way forward in time. Where is it? Cran doesn’t know. All he knows is that Transfers send forgeries to where there is a similar article, which always before has meant the original being brought forward to 2270. That’s how the strange attractors formed by the mathematics of chaos theory work—they attract. Only, due to Cran’s haste—or possibly his intoxicated fumbling—Tulia’s forgery has gone to some other attractor of Vermeers. Are there now two of the paintings on that silk-covered wall in 1668? Or has the original stopped somewhere else in time, snagged on a strange attractor someplace/sometime?

He doesn’t know. And it doesn’t matter where the original has gone—he cannot retrieve it.

Cran slumps to the floor. But after a few minutes, he staggers again to his feet. Why did he panic so? No one knows what happened. No one knows why the Square malfunctioned. All he has to do is erase the record—a task well within his skills—and report a malfunction. The Squares are a machine; machines break. No one ever has to know. All he has to say is that it spontaneously broke before he made any Transfer. That way, no one will blame him for an anomaly loose somewhere in the past.

Unless someone discovers that Tulia’s forgery is missing from storage.

But why would they look? The only reason to call up a forgery is if the original appears in a Square. Only—

He can’t think. He is afraid of what he has set loose in the timestream. He needs to get out of here. But he can’t, not yet. At his console, he carefully composes a report of spontaneous Square malfunction while not engaged in Transfer operations.

In his mind, he can still see the glowing light of his lost Vermeer.

2018

The two paintings sat on easels at the front of the room. Guards stood outside. All cell phones had been collected and stored in a lockbox. Everyone had been scanned for cameras and voice recorders, a procedure that at least half of those present found insulting. A few said so, loudly. But no one was protesting now. They were too enraptured.

Side by side, the two paintings of Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet looked identical to anyone but a trained observer. Half the people in the room were trained observers, art historians. The other half were forensic scientists.

Glenwood listened to one of the scientists’ summary of his long-winded analysis. He’d barely looked at the paintings, consulting only his notes. “This painting,” he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the Vermeer that had hung in the National since being privately donated sixteen years ago, “shows aging commensurate with having come from the mid-1600’s. As I explained, carbon dating is not particularly accurate when applied to time spans as short as a few hundred years. But the frame, canvas, and pigments in the paint are aged appropriately, and nearly all of them are ones that, you have told me, Vermeer habitually used. That has been verified by both Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry and Pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.”

“Almost all?” Glenwood said. “Some of the pigments are not from Vermeer’s historical period?”

“No,” said the expert from New York’s Met, “but they could have been added later during restoration attempts. After all, the provenance of this painting is clearly documented, and it includes several dealers throughout the centuries, some of whom might have tried to clean or repair the Vermeer for resale. And, of course, it has a provenance, which your newcomer does not.”

The New York expert had already made her position clear. She thought the “newcomer” was a clear forgery and Painting #1 the real thing. Glenwood was not so sure. He thought scientists, and even art experts, oversimplified.

Really skillful forgeries were notoriously hard to detect, and Vermeer’s art had been plagued by imitators. At one point, “experts” had attributed seventy paintings to him. Today the number was thirty-four, with more in dispute even under scientific analysis. Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at the Virginalswas considered genuine until 1947, a fake from 1947 to 2004, and then genuine again, with some disagreement. Science could only go so far.

A craquelure expert spoke next, and scornfully. “I don’t know, ladies and gentlemen, why we are even here. Painting #1 is clearly the real thing. Its pattern of surface cracking is completely in keeping with an age of354 years, and with the Dutch template of connected networks of cracking. The ‘newcomer’ has almost no craquelure at all. Furthermore, look how bright and new its colors are—it might have been painted last year. Its total lack of aging tags it as a forgery to anyone actually looking at it. Dr. Glenwood, why are we here?”

Everyone looked at Glenwood. He pushed down the temper rising in response to the craquelure expert’s tone.

“We are here because I, and not only I, am bothered by other differences between these two paintings—differences that were not obvious when we had only Painting #1 and could not compare them side by side. Now we can. Look at the pearl necklace in the second painting. Vermeer painted pearls often, and always they have the sparkle and luster of the second painting, which the first mostly lacks. The second also contains far more tiny detail in the painting-within-a-painting on the wall behind the woman sewing. That sort of painstaking detail is another Vermeer trademark. Look at the woman’s gown. Both versions feature the underpainting in natural ultramarine that Vermeer did beneath his reds to get a purplish tinge—but in Painting #2, the result is crisper. And Painting #2—I regard this as significant—was revealed by the X-ray analysis to have underlying elements that the artist painted over. Vermeer was obsessive about getting his pictures exactly right, and so very often he painted out elements and replaced them with others. Painting #1 shows no overpainting. I think Painting #2 is the original, and the picture we have hung in the National for sixteen years is the forgery.”

A babble of voices:

“You can’t believe that!”

“Perhaps a young artist, not yet proficient in his craft—”

“We have a clear chain of ownership going all the way back to Pieter van Ruijven—”

“The scientific evidence—”

“The lack of aging—”

In the end, Glenwood’s was the only dissenting voice. He was a Vermeer expert but not a forgery expert, and not the Director of the National Gallery. The painting that had mysteriously appeared would be banished to basement storage so that no one else would be fooled into paying some exorbitant sum for it. And the one that had hung in the museum for sixteen years would continue to hang there. It had been declared the real thing.

2270

The physicists spend six days trying to fix the Square. Finally they give up, because they can’t find any indicator that it is actually broken. Cran, who knows that it is not, insists over and over that the Square simply went dark. For six days, he holds his breath, not knowing what might happen. There are now two versions of the Vermeer loose in the timestream—what if that turns out to be so significant that something terrible happens to the present?

Nothing does.

Scientists and engineers wait for something—anything—to appear in Square Two. On the sixth day, something does: a crude Paleolithic figurine. Everyone goes crazy: this is the oldest piece of art the Squares have ever found. The expert on Stone Age art is summoned. The Director is summoned. The stone figurine is replaced with a lump of rock. No Transfer this early will disturb the timestream, not even if it’s witnessed; the Transfer will just be attributed to gods, or magic, or witchcraft. The fertility carving is reverently taken to the Gallery. Toasts are drunk. The past is being recovered; the Square works fine; all is well. Cran’s chest expands as he finally breathes normally.

As he leaves, the chief physicist gives Cran a long, hard look.

A few days later Cran goes to the Gallery to attend the presentation of Tulia’s painting. It is so beautiful that his heart aches. The picture is neither abstract nor mimetic but, rather, something of both. What moves Cran so much is the way she has painted light. It is always the use of light that he cares about, and Tulia has captured starlight on human figures in a way he has never seen done before. The light, and not their facial expressions, seems to indicate the mood of each of her three human subjects, although so subtly that it does not feel forced. The emotion feels real. Everything about the painting feels real.

A woman behind him says, “Pretty, yes—but actually, it’s just an exercise in an archaic and irrelevant art. Flat painting in a holo age? I mean, who cares?”

Cran wants to slug her. He does not. He congratulates Tulia, forcing words past the tightening in his throat, and leaves.

At home, he can’t sleep. He is agitated, dispirited, depressed. No—he is jealous, so jealous that his skin burns and his head feels as if it might explode. He hates himself for his jealousy, but he can’t help it. It drives him to pace, to almost—but not quite—cry out in the silence of his room. He can’t sit still. In the middle of the night he takes the underground tram to the Project dome.

No one is here. Constant attendance isn’t required; when a Square glows, it keeps on glowing until someone makes a Transfer. One of the Squares is glowing now. Inside is the image of Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet.

Cran is not really surprised. Previously, the Square had found, through the obscure mathematics of chaos, a strange attractor linked to this Vermeer. Once found, there was a strong chance it would find it again. But which picture is this—the original or Tulia’s forgery?

It is the original. He knows. The judgment isn’t reasoned; it doesn’t have to be. Cran knows, and he is prepared.

From a closet he takes one of his own pictures. The same size and shape as the Vermeer, it’s a portrait of Tulia, painted from memory and so bad that no one else has ever seen it. The Vermeer in the Square is surrounded by a wooden crate in darkness. Someone has, for whatever reason, boxed it up and stored it. Maybe it will be missed, maybe not. It no longer matters to him. All his movements are frenzied, almost spastic. Some small part of his mind thinks I am not sane. That doesn’t matter either.

Only once before has he felt like this, when he was very young and in love for the first and only time. He thought then, If I don’t touch her, I will die. He doesn’t think that now, but he feels it deeper than thought, in his very viscera. This must be what Vermeer felt when he painted the picture, alone in his studio, consumed from the inside.

It is the link between them.

Cran makes the Transfer. His dreadful painting disappears. Cran lifts Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet—not an image, the real thing—from the Square. For a long time he just holds it, drinking it in, until the painting grows too heavy and his eyes too dimmed with tears.

His plan is to box it into the same container in which he brought in his own painting. Cran has done research in the library database. He was careful to have a printer create four of Vermeer’s signature pigments—natural ultramarine, verdigris, yellow ochre, lead white—and that is what the security scanner will identify and match with the package he brought in. He will have the Vermeer in his own room, where no one ever goes, not even Tulia.

He has done it.

The door opens and the Director comes in.

“Cran! You couldn’t sleep either? Such a wonderful presentation of Tulia’s Life in Starlight. It made me want to come over and see what else the Project might have—Good Lord, is that a Vermeer?”

The Director, whose specialty is Tang Dynasty pottery but of course has a broad knowledge of art history, squints at the painting. All the frenzy has left Cran. He is cold as the lunar surface.

The data screen behind him says:

TRANSFER 655

Transfer Date Tuesday, Decade 29, 2270

Transfer to Past:

Planned Transfer: From present to March 31, 2018

Achieved Transfer: From present to March 31, 2018

Status: Transfer Successful

Transfer to Present:

Planned Transfer: From March 31, 2018 to present

Achieved Transfer: From March 31, 2018 to present

Status: Transfer successfully completed

“Yes,” he says, “a Vermeer. It just came through, from the twentieth century. I sent back a forgery. But I think this one is a forgery, too. Look—does it appear aged enough to you?”

A commission is assembled. They examine the painting, but not for very long. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet was painted, the database says, in 1664. If it had come naturally through time to 2018, it would be 354 years old. Scientific examination shows it to be less than ten years old.

Yes, Cran thinks. Four years from 1664 to 1668, plus a few weeks spent in 2018. Yes.

On the scientific evidence, the painting is declared a forgery. A skillful copy, but a copy nonetheless. It isn’t the first time the Project scanners have targeted a forgery. Previously, however, that had only happened with sculptures, particularly Greek and Roman.

“We already tried once for the original,” says the Director, “and got this. It would be too dangerous to the timestream to try again, I think, even if the original turns up in a Square. Given the math, that might happen.”

The head physicist stares hard at Cran. Cran has already been removed from the Project for failing to file clearances, which he has explained with “the memory lapses of age—I’m getting them more frequently now.” He will never be allowed near a Square again.

A handler says, “What shall I do with this forgery?”

The Director is bleak with disappointment. “It’s useless to us now.”

Cran says humbly, “May I have it?”

“Oh, why not. Take it, if you like fakery.”

“Thank you,” Cran says.

He hangs the Vermeer on the wall of his room. The sad lady sewing a bonnet, disappointed in her life—the broken toy, flung-aside pearls, drooping head, of course she is disappointed—glows in unearthly beauty. Cran spends an entire hour just gazing at the painting. When there is a knock on his door, he doesn’t jump. The picture is legitimately his.

It is Tulia. “Cran, I heard that—”

She stops cold.

Cran turns slowly.

Tulia is staring at the picture, and she knows. Cran understands that. He understands—too late—that she is the one person who would know. Why didn’t he think of this? He says, “Tulia . . .”

“That’s not a forgery.”

“Yes, it is. A skillful one, but . . . they did forensic tests, it’s not even ten years old, not aged enough to—”

“I don’t care. That’s not a copy, not even one by a forger better than I am. That’s the original Vermeer.”

“No,” Cran says desperately. But Tulia has stepped closer to the painting and is examining every detail. Seeing things he cannot, could never learn to see. She knows.

He debases himself to plead. “Tulia, you’re an artist. The real thing. For centuries to come, people will be collecting and cherishing your work. I am nothing. Please—leave me this. Please.”

She doesn’t even look at him. Her eyes never leave the painting.

“I’m an old man. You can tell them the truth after I’m dead. But please, for now . . . let me have this. Please.”

After an aeon, she nods, just once, still not looking at him. She leaves the room. Cran knows she will never speak to him again. But she won’t tell.

He turns back to the Vermeer, drinking in the artistry, the emotion, the humanity.

1672

Johannes walked through the Square beside the Hague, toward the water. In a few minutes, he would go inside—they could wait for him a few minutes longer. He studied the reflection of the stone castle, over four hundred years old, in the still waters of the Hofvijer. The soft light of a May morning gives the reflected Hague a shimmer that the actual government building did not have.

He came here to judge twelve paintings. They originally belonged to a great collector, Gerrit Reynst, who’d died fourteen years ago by drowning in the canal in front of his own house. Johannes couldn’t imagine how that had happened, but since then, the collection had known nothing but chaos. Parts of it had been sold, parts gifted to the king of England, parts bequeathed to various relatives. A noted art dealer offered twelve of the paintings to Friedrich Wilhelm, Grand Elector of Brandenburg, who at first accepted them. Then the Grand Elector’s art advisor said the pictures were forgeries and should be sent back. The art dealer refused to accept them. Now they hung in the Hague while thirty-five painters—thirty-five!—gave learned opinions on the pictures’ authenticity. One will be Vermeer.

He was curious to see the paintings. They were all attributed to great masters, including Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Holbein. Vermeer, who had never left the Netherlands, would not have another chance to see such works.

If they were genuine.

Opinions so far had been divided. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish copies from originals. Consider, for instance, his own Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet . . .

He hadn’t thought about that picture in years. Always, his intensity centered on what he was painting now. That, and on his growing, impossible debts. He was being paid for this opinion, or he could not have afforded the trip to give it.

A skillful forger could fool almost everyone. Johannes, who seldom left Delft and so had seen few Italian paintings, was not even sure that he would be able to tell the difference between a forged Titian and an original, unless the copy was very bad. And a good forgery often gave its owners the same pleasure as an original. Still, he would try. Deceivers should not be able to replace the real thing with imitations. Truth mattered.

But first he lingered by the Hofvijer, studying the shifting light on the water.