Firebird

PART II

Villanueva

Jack McDevitt

Firebird

The future of our species lies hidden in its past.

— Wolfgang Corbin, Let's Hear It for the Infidels, 6615 C.E.

“Why would they edit it out?” I asked, as we lifted away from Ocean-side.

“Public relations again,” said Alex. “We don't know who conducted the investigation, whether it was StarCorps or local. But they had a woman in distress. Worse, pictures of a woman in distress. They don't have a clue who she is, or what the ship is, or where it went. There were no reports of anyone in trouble. All vehicles were accounted for.” He looked down at the landscape. “How would they explain it to an aroused public?”

The ride home was somber. Alex buried himself in a book and barely spoke until we'd made the jump back into our home system. When I asked him whether we were ready to back away from the entire business, he said that he was disappointed in me. “You give up too easily, Chase.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“Winter.”

“What?”

“William Winter. Robin's friend. The one who died on Indikar. I think it's time we tried to find out what actually happened.”

Two days later, we were on a glide train crossing the continent. At Port Leo we got off, and spent the night at the Amerada Hotel. I'm embarrassed to admit that I had a little too much to drink and became part of the floor show. I don't usually do stuff like that, and I probably wouldn't have if Alex had been down in the club with me, but he wasn't, and I began thinking how maybe those people who were saying you should enjoy yourself while you can, have a big time as long as nobody gets hurt because you don't have forever, maybe they're right. So I joined two or three other women at the center of the party.

In the morning, I felt a bit guilty, and Alex was surprised when I told him I was going to have breakfast in my room. I didn't want to take a chance on running into anybody from the previous evening. But I could tell from the way Alex was talking to me that he knew something had happened. He didn't comment, though. And at noon, under a brilliant, cloudless sky, we checked out, rented a skimmer, and rode to Taraska.

Taraska is rugged country, valleys and ridges partially submerged in thick forest, lots of rock, and two very large mountains. It's a place for people who'd probably rather be living on an island or on the back side of the Moon except that they like the services that come with being within reach of civilization. And they had a taste for architecture. There were a couple of stores, two cafes, a nightclub, a church, and a city hall in the center of town, all quite elegant. Private homes were widely separated across the area, and were a trifle ostentatious, equipped with towers, domes, and arches.

The townspeople were convivial, though. They hung out in the cafes, or in the nightclub. Or at one another's houses. They threw a lot of parties, or so we were informed. And I had no trouble believing it.

William Winter's son, also named William, lived in a three-story house with columns and spires and circular windows. The lawn was beautifully manicured, and two lines of Salonika trees shaded the property. “What's he do for a living?” I asked Alex.

“As far as I can tell, he just sits on his front deck and watches the flowers grow.”

“Where'd the family money come from, do you know?”

“It's been there for generations.”

The landscape seemed utterly still as we began our descent. Their AI asked us to identify ourselves. “Alex Benedict,” I said. “We have an appointment with Mr. Winter.”

“Very good. Welcome to Whitcover.” We discovered later that every house in Taraska has a name. There were, for example, Burlingame and Epicenter and Pyrrhus. Burlingame had, we were told, been picked out of a hat. The owner of Epicenter was a geologist, and Pyrrhus was the property of a family that claimed to be descended from Greeks. A gray-white boulder dominated the lawn of Whitcover.

The AI sounded a bit snobbish. And we wondered why Winter didn't soften the greeting. This didn't look like an area that had problems with salesmen or the Lord's Messengers.

We touched down a minute or two later, and the AI instructed us to proceed to the front deck. We got out, dropped onto a stone pathway, walked to the front of the house, and climbed five marble stairs onto the porch. It was beautiful country. A soft breeze rustled the trees, flowers bloomed, and birds twittered. The door opened, and we passed between two columns and went inside, where we were greeted by a young man dressed in formal garb. “Good afternoon” he said. “Mr. Winter will be with you shortly.”

He was a hologram. Standing in front of a lamp in the hallway, he cast no shadow. He smiled politely, led us into a reception room, and asked us to be seated. When we'd complied, he smiled again, turned on his heel, and left.

The room was luxuriously furnished with thick satin curtains, a dark, padded sofa, three armchairs, and an exquisitely carved coffee table. Several pieces of twelfth-century transliteral art were mounted on the walls, along with a lush, fur-lined tapestry and a framed wedding picture of William Winter, Sr., and his bride. Two sculpted busts, a man and a woman from another age, looked across the room at each other.

We heard voices in the hallway. Then a short, plump man entered the room. “Mr. Benedict,” he said. “So good to meet you. And Ms. Kolpath. I'm Billy Winter. What can I do for you?”

Alex expressed his admiration for the property and said something about the pleasant weather. Winter asked if we'd like something to drink. Of course. That would be very kind. Winter spoke to the AI, and Alex got to the point. “As I mentioned,” he said, “we're doing some research on eminent fourteenth-century figures, men and women who had a permanent effect on the development of the culture. We'd like very much to talk with you about your father.”

Our host settled into an armchair. “My time is yours,” he said.

A bottle of wine was brought in by a middle-aged woman, who smiled politely, took three glasses from a cabinet, and put them before us. She withdrew, and Billy filled the glasses. We raised them to his father, and to the Arcane Club, of which he'd been a founding member, and which included some of the century's most influential thinkers. Maria Cauley, who'd been a major contributor to court reform, had been a member. And Lyle Kashevik, the neurologist who'd argued the necessity of religion for inner peace while warning against its vulnerability to abuse. And Indira Khalalla, who developed the moonlight pheromone that was so potent that moralistic opponents took her to court to block its use. Michael Goshok had belonged during the years when he was leading the effort to ban AIs that could theoretically read minds by examining facial expressions. Goshok had been a liaison with the Mutes, and he must have understood what it would have meant to humans to have their minds open for all to see.

“Did your father ever explain to you,” Alex asked, “why he wanted to go to Indikar?”

“No,” said Billy. “I was only ten when it happened. He said goodbye, and suddenly he just wasn't around anymore. My mother told me that she never understood what it was about.”

“Had he gone out on missions like that before? That you're aware of?”

“No. It was the first time he'd been off-world.” The mother, we knew, had died several years earlier. “She used to talk about how she'd had a bad feeling the first time she'd seen him.”

Alex leaned back in his chair. “You mean Chris Robin?”

“Yes.” Billy took a long swallow of the wine. “If you ever figure out why he went, if you find out why my father died, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.”

Alex assured him he would. He got up and walked over to the wedding picture. The couple looked happy, even exultant, the way newlyweds inevitably do. The groom might have been a bit too poised. The bride, whose name was Suniya, was literally aglow. I love old wedding pictures. Sometimes I suspect we all peak at that moment, and that afterward we get back to the business of living, and it's a downhill run.

“You wanted to see his papers,” said Billy.

“Yes, if we may.”

“Absolutely.” He raised his voice a notch: “Miranda, make everything available to Chase and Alex, if you will.”

“As you wish, Mr. Winter,” said the AI. I couldn't help noticing the formality. Most people are on first-name terms with the house system.

“Your father left a substantial reputation behind,” said Alex.

“Have you read him?” he asked. He was looking at me.

Alex bailed me out. “Of course,” he said. “I read War, Peace, and Mr. Kargolo when I was in college.”

“It won the Excelsior Award in 1376.”

“Deservedly. I've also read The Libertines.”

“He was especially proud of that one. It didn't win any awards, but he thought it was his best work.” He beamed. Then it was back to business: “Alex,” he said, “as I mentioned to you, everything in the documents is available for your inspection. But nothing may be downloaded, other than his books.” The other titles were Mathematics and God; The Grand Cycle; Mutes, Philosophers, and Lawyers; and Our Day in the Sun. “I wouldn't want you to think I don't trust you, but it's a precaution that my father always insisted on, so I feel a certain duty-”

“It's no problem, Billy.”

“So what are we looking for?”

I'd asked the question on the way to the house and expected Alex to respond with his trademark line that we'd know it when we saw it. But he was a bit more precise this time, though not much: “Chase, we want to know the reason for his connection with Robin.”

The amount of material contained in Winter's papers was breathtaking. Aside from notes on the six books he'd written, which were probably more extensive than the books themselves, there were journals, diaries, comments on whatever he happened to be reading, and records of conversations. There were observations on the culture, on political events, on the media, on religion, on theatrical performances, on his dietary tastes, on child rearing, on marriage, and on AIs (which, he maintained, were in fact conscious entities and therefore should be granted rights identical to people). There was hardly an aspect of human behavior that he left untouched. And he included a few chess games.

“Alex,” I said, “we're going to be here for years.”

“Chase,” he said, “you go through the journals. Look for anything that rings a bell.” He went to the far side of the room, pulled the curtains to block off some of the sunlight, and sat down at a table.

Robin's name turned up in various contexts, as a friend, as a brilliant-if somewhat erratic-physicist, as an occasional luncheon companion, as a favorable reviewer, as a reviewer who'd found fault with some of Winter's conclusions about human evolution (“Robin thinks we are not getting any smarter”), and as a pioneer in the field of subquantum research.

“He always felt,” Winter wrote, “that he'd been born in the wrong era. He envied those who'd lived during the scientific golden age, the period from Francis Bacon to Armand Castillo. From the concept that the world could be explained without invoking the supernatural, which can be traced to the arrival in Italy of the Greek scholars who'd fled the fall of Constantinople in the thirteenth century. And which continued until Castillo demonstrated nine hundred years later that there would never be a Grand Unified Theory. That the cosmos was essentially a masterpiece of disorganization, and therein lay its essential elegance.

“Robin felt that once that had happened,” Winter said, “there was nothing left to do except construct applications. Collect data. And watch the sun go down in the evening. I'm sorry to say that it's difficult to take issue with him on that point.”

Elsewhere, he described Robin as a beneficiary of a line of complexity issues worked out by Friedmann Koffer, the physicist who had contributed so much to the conclusion of hostilities during the Mute War. Winter also mentioned that Robin's work on the multiverse would not have been possible without the efforts of a team that combined with Mute scientists after the conflict to begin looking into the possibility of devising an experiment to establish the existence of alternative universes.

I read a detailed explanation, but I couldn't understand much of it. I decided that Winter was either pretty advanced in the sciences for a historian or that he simply wasn't very good at explaining things.

The reality was that there could be a connection between these two guys that would not necessarily cite Robin's name. So I spent the rest of the morning scanning the journals, looking for multiple-universe issues, the golden age, the subquantum world, Koffer, and the sightings. Something. I found a few possibilities.

Winter was also interested in the occasional sightings by the space stations that seemed to have no explanation. He referred to them as “Sanusar events” and recorded dates and details for some going back more than three thousand years. His sole comment: They've been with us a long time.

Winter enjoyed analyzing how the human outlook had changed as a result of the discovery that we were not alone. What would we be like now, he was fond of asking, if we still believed the universe was empty except for us? He thought the presence of the Mutes had induced a degree of humility that we'd lacked for millennia. There were no more claims, as there had once been, that we were spiritually, if not physically, at the center of the universe. The God of the pre-Mute era had been somehow smaller than the one most people believe in today.

I should mention here that I was reared by parents who felt the necessity of a personal connection with God. We were not, however, members of an established faith. (Few people are now, of course.) But we believed there was a greater Power.

I lost that during my teen years, mostly because I couldn't conceive of a compassionate creator who would give us a Darwinian system, with its requisite food chain. When I was growing up, I had a cousin, two or three times removed, who'd piloted interstellars. He told me it was impossible to look down on a distant planetary surface, to watch moons glide around their parent worlds, to cruise through a set of planetary rings, and not feel the presence of something greater than the visible world. He was right. I have felt all that.

But also, especially when I've been alone in the Belle-Marie, I also feel an overwhelming solitude. And if that seems contradictory, nevertheless it's there. The majesty of those places, of planetary rings and comets sailing through the sky and stars that remain stable for billions of years, serves only to drive the point home: such incredible beauty. And there's no one but me to look at it.

Adam and Eve have been gone a long time. Genesis is a relic from a different era. And we've known for thousands of years that the universe is immense beyond comprehension. But none of that ever came home, Winter says, until we looked out and saw someone looking back. Now we feel the vastness. Worshippers are more inclined to perceive God not as the owner of the church down at the corner but as the creator of a universe whose dimensions and complexity leave us breathless.

Winter himself is talking about believers when, in a journal entry dated a few weeks before his death, he comments that “I'm looking forward with enthusiasm to the flight in the Breakwater.”

He continues: “What a joy it will be, finally, to see Villanueva.”

Villanueva.

There was no mention of Indikar.

Villanueva has been gone now almost as long as Adam and Eve. It had been renowned in its time as a refuge and a retreat for the faithful of all religions. But its name had never come up in the accounts of Winter's death on that final voyage.

Villanueva had been colonized during the Great Migration, which occurred in the middle centuries of the fourth millennium. It was third planet from the sun Phalangia. There'd been no intention to create a permanent settlement. The world, along with the rest of the planetary system, was drifting toward a massive dust cloud, which would radically change the climate and make it uninhabitable for centuries. Estimates gave it between five hundred and twelve hundred years.

But five hundred years is a long time. And Villanueva was an ideal world, a second Earth. Originally, it was simply a great spot for a vacation. Then it became home for some religious groups who preferred to be away from a terrestrial culture that many perceived as immoral and godless. There were some who maintained that the claims of approaching destruction were simply a conspiracy, put together by the wealthy, who wanted to keep this pristine world for themselves.

So people came. And many of them stayed. When the dust cloud finally arrived, their descendants were, incredibly, taken by surprise. Most must have thought they could ride it out. In any case, there were too many for an evacuation. To this day, it remains the worst catastrophe in history.

So why would Winter, and apparently Chris Robin, be going to Villanueva?

I showed the notation to Alex. “What happened to Indikar?” I asked.

The hours slipped by. Billy came in to ask if we'd made any progress. “Got a question for you,” said Alex. “Did your father ever mention Villanueva?”

“Where's that?” he asked.

“Pretty far from here.”

“It's on a different planet?”

“It is a different planet.”

“No,” he said. “Not that I can recall. The only place he ever went to was Indikar. Why do you ask?”

“He mentions it in one of his journals.”

Billy shook his head. “I can't recall anything about that. My understanding is that he and Robin only went to Indikar. Nowhere else. Maybe they intended to go there later.”

We enjoyed a salad and sandwiches out in the garden. “You should consider moving here,” Billy said, while a soft breeze whispered in the trees. “This is about as cold as it gets.”

“Did you ever meet Robin?” Alex asked.

“The first time I saw him was at the memorial service. For my father. Other than that, no. I don't even remember his name being mentioned except when my father was going on that flight.”

“He came to pay his respects?”

“Yes. At the time, I still couldn't really believe my dad wasn't coming home. I hadn't gotten used to it. We had a service, and Professor Robin came. I remember he was having a hard time himself. His voice broke up while he was speaking. He said it was all his fault. Took all the blame on himself. It started my mother crying again, and, pretty soon, everybody was hysterical.”

“He never explained precisely what happened?”

“They were apparently doing everything from orbit. But Dad wanted to land on the world, so they took him down and got attacked by a lizard.” He paused. “I don't remember whether Robin actually told us that or I read it later.

“Professor Robin stayed in touch with us. Always asked if there was anything he could do. There never was, of course. But looking back now, I know he tried to be a source of consolation to my mother. It didn't take, though. Then, when I was in college, he was gone, too.”

“You have any idea,” I asked, “what might have happened to him?”

“You mean his disappearance?” He shook his head. “None.” He finished his sandwich and sank back in his chair. The tree branches swayed gently. “I can't imagine what it might have been. I suspect he was probably drinking that night and just fell into the ocean.”

Alex decided to stay over one more day, but we needed somebody back at the country house. So I made arrangements to return to Andiquar that evening.

I rode back to Port Leo in a taxi. Jacob contacted me as I was entering the station. “I know you don't like to be bothered on the road, Chase, but I got word today that Alex will receive the DiPreta Award.” The award, named for the philanthropist Edward DiPreta, recognized contributions to interspecies understanding. “First it was the Mutes,” Jacob said. “Then that business last year. I thought he'd like to know. The presentation will be made at the end of the month.”

“That's great news.”

“Yes. I was glad to hear it. He deserves some recognition. Lately it seems to have been nothing but criticism. Criticism by people who themselves have never contributed anything.”

“You've a point, Jacob. Anyhow, I'm not with him at the moment. I know he doesn't like to be called when he's out of the office, but I think we can make an exception for this. I'll let him know.”

“Very good, Chase. Umm-I was wondering-”

“Yes, Jacob?”

“Would it be okay with you if I-”

“You want to tell him.”

“I would like that very much.”

Two hours later, as I sat in my compartment, watching a dark landscape blur past, I got a call from Alex. “Just wanted to make sure you got there okay.”

“I'm fine, Alex. On my way home now.”

“Good. No problem with tickets?”

“None.”

“Okay.” He hesitated. “Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”

“No. I think that's it.”

“You already know, don't you?”

“Yeah. Congratulations.”

“Actually, there is something more.”

“What's that?”

“They're splitting the award this year.”

“Oh.” That had never happened before. “How could they do that?” I asked.

“Don't know. These things just happen, I guess.”

“Who else is getting it?”

“You are, Chase. Congratulations.”

Later, considerably later, I learned that Alex had insisted that the DiPreta Committee recognize me also. He tried to keep it from me but I'm too good at tracking down secrets.

I've spent too many years watching a pro at work.