Coming Home

Twenty-seven

The jump out to Neptune took almost no time at all, but we surfaced almost a million kilometers from Larissa. “Make yourself comfortable for a couple of days,” I told Alex. And he did, settling in with a twenty-second-century book he’d picked up that insisted there was nothing left for science to do. I’ve mentioned that Alex, like his customers, enjoys the feel of objects that have passed through hands in ancient times. But he doesn’t stop there. He also has a passion for ideas from other eras, concepts, points of view. I don’t know anyone else who reads Plato for sheer pleasure.

If you sit by a couch that had once served Owen Watkin, he’d say, or Albert Einstein, you can almost feel their presence. He never tried to explain the psychology of it. It was simply, for him and for his clients, a reality. It was the reason that he never felt guilty about selling artifacts to his customers rather than donating them to museums. Put it in a museum, he’d say, and people wander past and stare at it. But that’s nothing other than a superficial reaction. The people who come to Rainbow Enterprises want something more. They hope to share their time, their lives, with an historical figure they’ve come to know. To reach across the centuries, the millennia, and touch Serena Black. And I know how that sounds. There’s no way I can explain that to anyone who doesn’t already understand why some people love antiques. But Alex concedes that sitting in light emanating from a lamp once owned by a celebrity doesn’t really allow you to hold a conversation with that person. To do that, you need an avatar. Or, for someone from an earlier era, a book. I should mention, by the way, that it’s especially difficult to explain the passion when I don’t really share it. Alex tells me that he feels sorry for me. And when I tell him maybe in time I’ll acquire the taste, he says no. He tells me the boat has left.

I’d picked up a jigsaw puzzle at the space station. A real one where you actually need a table. It was two thousand pieces, and depicted the Hadley Telescope against an array of stars and a service vehicle. I set it up in the passenger cabin. Alex watched as I started on it, said nothing for a few minutes, and finally asked whether I could finish it before we had to change course or velocity, which would scatter the pieces. “That’s what makes it interesting,” I said.

He laughed. But it didn’t take long before he joined me.

We worked on it for much of the first day. That evening, he suggested we watch Casablanca. I wasn’t exactly reluctant, but I’d been looking forward to seeing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Alex said, “Whatever you like.” But he looked disappointed. I knew the game, but I caved anyhow, and we went with Casablanca.

I’ll confess that I loved the film. And I was surprised to discover that another of my favorite songs, “As Time Goes By,” provides the central theme. When it was done, I watched with tears in my eyes as Rick and Captain Renault walked off across the airfield.

In the morning, I went back to work on the puzzle while Alex stared at the incoming pictures of Larissa. We were still twenty hours out. The moon isn’t much more than a large chunk of rock shaped like a potato, with a length of about two hundred kilometers. It orbits Neptune twice daily.

After a while, I went over and sat down beside him. I looked at the images of a bleak moonscape coming in through the scopes. “Where do you think they would have put the station?”

“The accounts don’t say, but I can’t believe they didn’t have it on the side facing the planet.”

“Okay. That makes sense. Did the station have a name, Alex?”

He had to look it up. “Landros. He was the commander of the first mission to get out this far.”

There was a sudden flash directly in front of us. A rock, maybe, or even some dust, had drifted in and gotten eradicated by the laser.

Alex cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, “I’m not sure it wouldn’t have been better to leave the artifacts to the looters rather than bury them out here. If that’s what they did. There’s something basically indecent about hiding things in a place like this.”

“Especially,” I said, “if you forget about them and leave them here.”

He nodded. “That’s what I mean.”

We turned the scopes on Larissa as we approached but saw nothing other than rock, broken ridges, promontories, and craters. Then it slipped behind Neptune.

It needed only a few minutes to reappear. I sensed an air of desperation as Alex manipulated the images we’d been getting, shifting angles and adjusting magnification and seeing nothing but desolation. “We need to be closer to make anything out,” he said. “Just put us in orbit around the moon, and we should be able to find the station easily enough.”

Neptune has five rings. Larissa, at a range of eighty-five thousand kilometers from the planet, lies outside the ring system.

The gravity level on the moon is almost nonexistent. I’d have weighed about four pounds on the surface. When, finally, we got close, I folded a sheet, placed it over the puzzle (which was about half-finished), and taped it down. Then I eased us into orbit.

Alex sat by a portal staring out as the moonscape moved slowly past.

We spent the better part of a day in orbit and saw nothing but craters and rocks. “We have to get closer,” he said.

“That means we’d have to burn a lot of fuel. It doesn’t have the gravity to support—”

“Give me a suggestion.”

“How about we leave Belle in orbit and use the lander.”

We climbed into the lander and launched. I took us down to an altitude of about six hundred meters. “This place looks so dreary,” I said. “It’s hard to believe anybody would have left something valuable out here.”

“That’s precisely what makes this the perfect sanctuary,” said Alex. He was sitting up front with his jaw propped against one fist, staring out at the ground passing beneath us. We were moving faster than we had been in the ship. “Have faith.”

“Somebody told me once that’s a good way to get into trouble.”

We didn’t know what the base looked like. The only thing we could be relatively sure of was that it would have been constructed on an elevated area.

Alex was beside me in the right-hand seat. We were both wearing goggles which, at least theoretically, made it easier to see in the azure glow of the giant planet. His lips were set in a thin line. “It has to be here somewhere,” I said.

“Let’s hope so.”

Larissa was, of course, in tidal lock. The sun was too far away to be anything more than a bright star. The lighting, enhanced by a ring system that rose almost vertically into the sky, produced a terrain that seemed utterly unreal. We were constantly seeing shapes that did not exist, braking, going down, moving to starboard, doing whatever was necessary to change our angle. Each time, as our spotlights touched jewel-like azure objects, they went away, and we were left only with rocky escarpments and crags.

After about two hours, Alex pointed. “There it is.” There was a note of triumph in his voice. We were looking down at what appeared to be a cluster of connected cubes and domes spread across varying levels of the moonscape.

I took us lower. This time the object did not blink out.

There was a reasonably flat area within a few hundred meters. I took us in and touched down. We sat for a while, studying the structure. It was perched across the top of a pair of ridges. There was a telescope and scanners and radio antennas. Dark ports looked out at us. Eventually, we got up and climbed into pressure suits. We checked air supplies and radios, and when we were ready, Alex led the way out through the airlock. We walked carefully through the almost nonexistent gravity, resisting the temptation to do any jumping. We climbed to the top of the ridge, looked up at a wide, flattened dome. A walkway that took us directly to a hatch.

There was a portal on either side. Both were dark. We pointed wrist lamps into them and saw furniture. Tables, chairs, sofas. “I think,” said Alex, “there might be some valuable stuff here.”

A pad was located beside the hatch. He touched it. When nothing happened, he pressed harder. “Not working,” he said.

We rounded the building and saw more structures of varying shapes. There was nothing elaborate, just modular parts that fit together like a large puzzle. They were all connected and stood at varying elevations on that uneven ground. A block-shaped building supported a group of scanners and dishes. It was at the highest point in the network and was linked to the dome by a bridge. In the distance, separated from everything else, we saw a collapsed telescope, the tube still attached to the mount but lying on a few rocks.

The block-shaped building had another airlock. This one worked.

I jumped when lights blinked on. And I heard Alex swallow. “Somebody’s done some maintenance,” I said.

“Maybe.” The lights were all outside. A luminous line had also appeared, framing the hatch. And a single lamp hidden in the wall lit up the entry. The hatch rolled into the overhead, and more lights came on inside the airlock. Alex looked back at me. “Stay here,” he said. “Let’s make sure this thing works before we go any farther.”

He went inside, touched something, and the hatch closed. “So far so good,” he said. “It’s running air into the chamber.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

“You think this is really it?”

He took a deep breath. “Let’s not get excited.” He was silent for a minute. Then: “Okay, it’s completed pressurization. We’re good.”

After we were sure the hatches worked, I joined him inside. The building was filled with chairs and tables. Some clothes had been left, and some basic equipment, and something that must have been a data-processing system. Which had no power. But the lights came on as we went room to room. It was a place where time had barely moved. Whoever had been there might have left only a week earlier. “They’ve got to be here someplace, Chase.” He was talking about the Centralia artifacts. “This place would have been perfect.”

But we didn’t see anything. Eventually, we went back outside, surveyed the area, and found two storage buildings. Neither had power, so we used the lasers to cut our way in. They contained some large tanks, a lander that I would not have wanted to try traveling in, and some spare parts. “If this was where they brought everything,” he said, “somebody cleaned it out.”

“Maybe Baylee?”

“No. Baylee would have had to cut his way in. Same as we did.”

We checked the other buildings. All were, as we expected, empty. They were basically nothing more than living quarters. “I really thought we had a decent chance this time,” said Alex when it was over, and we stood outside in the soft blue light. Reluctantly, we turned away and climbed back into the lander.

“Is there any other Larissa in the solar system?” I asked. “Maybe an abandoned orbiter or something?”

“Not that I’ve been able to find.”

“What about an asteroid? There are millions of them.”

“I checked. They don’t use names. They have an alphanumeric system, which was introduced after the Dark Age. I couldn’t find a record of what preceded it.”

After we got back to the Belle-Marie, Alex sat staring wearily, sometimes at the magnified images on the displays, sometimes out at the rocks. Finally, he shook his head. “Let’s go home,” he said.