A Planet for Emily

During her long wait, Suzanne had been encouraged by Matt and Matt's wife Emma who had stood in at the bar for a time, to approach Rods and to plough on regardless of her initial reception. He was, she had been told, a difficult study, but fine once you got past the gruffness.

"I sent you this." Suzanne opened up the screen of her digital assistant and laid it on the bar beside the trader, who glanced sideways at it.

"You were the one who sent those notes?"

"In here is where the Dawn Treader went."

Matt leaned forward for a better look; the older man who had been there when Rods arrived abandoned his pretense of not listening to the conversation to sidle up to the bar and peer at the screen.

They read:

'Replicant quoting Blake plus Tiger – 136746622211131'.

"I see you've attracted an audience," said Rods, finally turning on his stool. "Those cryptic notes don't add up to star catalogue numbers. We tried a cryptographic analysis on those numbers and came up with nothing, Ma'm.."

"Suzanne."

"Suzanne. This must've cost you a tidy sum to send over the squeezed light link, but it makes as much sense here as in Earth Station. You've come from Earth Station, right?"

Suzanne nodded.

"So, you came up three weeks by freighter just to point out these notes again?

"Eve, my sister, said everyone had been sworn to secrecy, but the captain had told her more than the others and I wasn't to write it down or tell anyone. She said they knew where El Dorado was."

Matt and the older man looked startled, Rods looked bored.

"El Dorado, really?" he said.

"Yes, the legendary city of gold."

"I know what El Dorado was supposed to mean way back on Earth," snapped Rods, "but it has a local meaning – a planet where you can walk on the surface."

"And Eve said her group knew where it was."

"How did her group find it and why did they tell her? While we're on the subject, where is it?"

"The people who got her to come said they'd found the site in old records. Both humans and Zards had been there but no Zards now as it's too far out and they have Earth now..."

"Yes, they have earth," interjected Matt, and we've got nothing."

"...They needed someone with medical training, and they had trouble because they wanted to keep it secret. They told Eve to get her and her partner to come along, on condition that she didn't tell anyone else, but she left this."

"Clues her own sister doesn't understand," said Rods.

"I thought it must mean something," Suzanne said, faltering. Suzanne had come a long way convinced that she held the key to her sister's disappearance, if only she could get those looking for Eve's group to pay attention. She had thought there would be some form of government and the search would be in the hands of officials. Instead she had found a lone trader who had given up.

"I looked at these clues every which way I could think of," said Rods. "I found the replicant poem thing."

"Replicant poem thing?" Suzanne had been baffled by that reference.

"Sure, in a film a made a very long time ago a sort-of bio soldier called a replicant who's turned killer walks into an eye shop, where this guy makes eyes for these replicants and quotes Blake."