Polaris

NINE

Alex told me to take the next day off to compensate for the travel, but I went in anyhow that afternoon. When I got there, he was looking at screens filled with information about Jess Taliaferro.

The onetime director is the subject of three major biographies. He has appeared at least tangentially in dozens of histories of his era. I’d thumbed through much of the material by then. It was not that he was a towering political or scientific figure, or that the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research broke new boundaries during his thirteen-year tenure at its helm. But he seemed to know all the groundbreakers of the era. He was constantly in the company of councillors and presidents, major show business personalities, Galaxy prizewinners, and other newsmakers. But more important from my point of view was that he seemed to be a man of iron principle. He was a champion of humane causes. Take care of the environment.

Arrange things so nobody gets too much power. Make sure we educate, rather than indoctrinate, our kids. Find a way to establish a permanent peace with the Mutes.

He was unstinting in his exertions, and he never backed away from a fight. He supported efforts to reduce government corruption, to achieve stable populations on the worlds of the Confederacy, to reduce the power of the media, to control corporate thieves. He battled developers who were willing to destroy archeological sites and pristine wilderness. He did what he could to protect species in danger of extinction.

He, Boland, and Klassner were close allies in these culture wars. “People never appreciated him,” one biographer observed, “until he closed up his office that last evening, said good night to his staff, and walked away from the world.”

In those days, Survey was located in Union Hall, an old stone building that had once been a courthouse. When Taliaferro was ready to go home, his skimmer routinely picked him up at the rooftop pad. But on that final day, he instructed his AI that he would be dining out and that he’d call for transportation if and when he needed it.

With whom was he planning to eat? “Nobody knows,” said Jacob. “When investigators tried to figure out what had happened, they discovered he’d pretty much cleaned out his bank accounts, except for a modest sum that eventually went to his daughter, Mary. His only child, by the way.”

“What about his wife?”

“He was widowed. She died young. Boating accident. According to friends, he never stopped mourning her. But there was another woman later in his life.”

“Who was that?” asked Alex.

“Ivy Cumming. She was a physician.”

“How much money did he have?”

“Millions.”

That surprised Alex. “Where’d it come from?” he asked.

“It was old money,” I said. “His family’d been wealthy for generations. When its resources came under his control he began using it to support various causes. He seems to have been utterly unselfish.”

I had dinner with a friend, went home, and decided to take a whack at the Taliaferro avatar. I’d seen it briefly at the Polaris convention, of course, when I didn’t even know who he was. Now I had a few questions.

There’s always a problem, of course, with an avatar. It looks like the person it’s representing, but you know it’s really just a projection backed by a data retrieval system. People trust data retrieval systems, though, and the avatars look absolutely real. They’re convincing, so everyone has a tendency to take these things at their word, when in fact all the information is based on the input provided by the subject himself, which is to say, it’s somebody putting his best foot forward. And there might be additions by interested persons with agendas of their own. Consequently, they’re no more reliable than the subject himself might have been. If you’re approaching one of these conversations to learn something rather than to be entertained, you have to bring along a healthy skepticism.

Jess Taliaferro appeared standing on a rocky beach. He was a small man, middle-aged, with fading auburn hair that would not stay down and eyes that seemed a bit too far apart. He had too much stomach and not enough shoulder. When he moved, as he did constantly during our conversation, he was awkward, weaving from side to side in a flatfooted manner. There was much of the camaroo about him, the big southeastern bird that one finds waddling along shorelines looking for stranded sealife. He was quite ordinary in appearance. I would not have thought of him as a driving force. But there you are. You just never know.

“Hello, Ms. Kolpath,” he said. “You were at the convention, I believe.”

“Yes, I was. I enjoyed your presentation.”

“Very kind of you.” He stopped by a stone bench, facing out to sea. It seemed to be the only structure in the area. “May I?” he asked.

“Please,” I said.

He sat down. “It’s lovely here at night.” He was dressed in the antique manner of his era, colorful shirt, wide-open collar, cuffed trousers, a rakish blue hat with a tassel.

“Yes,” I said.

“How may I help you?”

How, indeed? A long wave broke and rolled up the beach. “Dr. Taliaferro, please tell me about yourself. What you care about. What you’re proud of. How you felt on the day the Polaris set out. What you think happened.”

“About myself?” He looked surprised.

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“Most people want to hear about the Polaris. Not about me.”

“You know why.”

“Sure. But it’s as if I never did anything in my life except send those people to Delta Kay.”

He talked about his family, his dreams, his years of service to Survey.

“Did you ever have any indication at all,” I asked, “that there might be somebody else out there, other than the Mutes?”

His eyes slid shut. “No,” he said. “Oh, look, we knew there would be other sentient life somewhere. We’ve always known that. The universe is just too big. It happened twice that we knew about, so we understood that it necessarily existed elsewhere. Once you had that much, once you knew it wasn’t the result of some virtually impossible combination of events, then there had to be others. Had to be.

The real question was whether they were scattered so far in time and space that we would never encounter another in the lifetime of the species.”

There were lights moving at sea.

“An intersection seemed so unlikely that we never seriously considered it. I mean, we had a policy in place, guidelines on what to do if anyone actually saw another ship out there. But we never believed it would happen. And we certainly assumed that if it did, the aliens would not be hostile. Cautious, perhaps, but not hostile.”

“Why not? The Mutes are hostile.”

“They’re hostile because there was a series of incidents at the beginning, when we first discovered each other, that created conflict. It was mishandled on our end, and to a degree, on theirs. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s fault. People were surprised by an unprecedented situation and they reacted badly. Some of it’s in the genes. We can’t stand to be near them. Have you ever been close enough to a Mute to feel the effect?”

He wasn’t simply talking about their mind-reading abilities, but the fact that they touched something revolting deep in the bone. It was hard to say why; they were humanoid. But people reacted to them the way they did to large spiders, or snakes.

Add to that the knowledge that, in their presence, your brain lay open to the sunlight.

That you had to struggle not to think of anything that would embarrass you. That the creature knew more about you than you did because all the walls were down, all the rationalizations and pretensions set aside. They knew, for example, precisely how we reacted to them. It made diplomacy difficult.

“No, I’ve never seen one.” There weren’t many of them running around inside the Confederacy. They didn’t like us very much either. “Are you sure they weren’t involved?” I asked.

“We looked into it. You know, of course, they’d have to come through the Confederacy to get to Delta Karpis. Or go exceedingly far out of their way.”

“Is that the only reason?”

“Not at all. Things had been quiet between them and us for a long time when the Polaris happened.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked up at the moon. It wasn’t Rimway’s moon. Too big, and hazy with atmosphere. In fact, it had oceans.

“We couldn’t see any motive they’d have to kidnap the people on the Polaris. Certainly none worth risking war over. We talked to some of them. I personally talked with a representative.” He made a face at the memory and tried to shake it off. “He said they had nothing to do with it. I believed him. And I’ve seen no reason to change my mind.”

“Why would you take his word? There don’t seem to be any other likely suspects.”

“Because whatever else you want to say about them, Chase, they are notoriously poor liars.”

“Okay.”

“Furthermore, I couldn’t see how they could have accomplished it. They couldn’t have approached the Polaris without being seen. Had that happened, Maddy would surely have sounded the alarm. We’d have known.”

“Afterward,” I said, “you mobilized everything you had to look for them.”

“Yes. In fact, a sizable portion of the Confederate navy went out and conducted the search. And, although we didn’t encourage anybody, at least not officially, a lot of corporate and even some private vessels helped. The hunt went on for more than a year.”

“I assumed there’d been a campaign to get everyone involved.”

“We didn’t need a campaign. You don’t know what it was like at the time.

People were scared. We thought something new had shown up. Something with hostile intentions and advanced technology. Something completely different. It was almost as if we’d discovered a supernatural entity. It was so bad there was even talk of an alliance with the Mutes. So a lot of corporate types sent their ships out. Became part of the effort.” He moved some sand around with his feet. He was wearing sandals. “It generated good publicity for them. For the corporations.”

“And never a sign of anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“That’s correct. We never found anything.”

One of the vents came on and delivered cool air into the room. We sat quietly, listening to it. It was reassuring, evidence that basic physical law still ruled. “Dr.

Taliaferro,” I said, “do you have a theory? What do you think happened to them?”

He considered it. “I think they were taken,” he said finally. “By whom, or for what purpose, I don’t know.”

His bench was placed just beyond the reach of the incoming tide. We watched a wave play out and sink into the sand. “Why was there an empty compartment on the Polaris? ”

“You mean, why were there only six passengers instead of seven?”

“That’s the same question. But, yes.”

“That’s easy to explain. The eighth compartment was reserved for me. I’d intended to go.”

“For you?” He nodded.”

“You were fortunate. Why did you change your mind?”

“Something happened at the office. I just don’t know what it was. I was never informed. I, the avatar. Whatever it was, it was serious enough that I felt constrained to cancel out of the flight.”

“It was at the last minute.”

“Yes. We were literally boarding the Polaris. ”

I pressed for an explanation, but he insisted he had none. Whatever it had been, Taliaferro had kept it to himself. And I recalled seeing the director leaving early at the Skydeck launch. “Dr. Taliaferro, how about your disappearance? Why would you have walked off the way you did?” I should mention that it was a rhetorical question.

No answer would be forthcoming. This Taliaferro was a construct of what was known of the man. It was, in effect, only his public persona. I wasn’t disappointed.

“It is strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes. What do you think?” Might as well push the point. I’d heard the question asked at the convention, and he’d offered no explanation. But the atmosphere was better on that beach, alone and in casual surroundings as opposed to the clamor in the meeting room.

“I have to think I met with foul play. There were people who would have liked to see me dead.”

“For example?”

“Barcroft. Tulami. Yin-Kao. Charlie Middleton, for God’s sake. They’re too numerous to name, Chase. But it’s all in the record. Easy enough for you to find, if you’re really interested. I stepped on a lot of toes in my time.”

“Any who might have been willing to take your life?”

He thought about it. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But it appears someone did me in.”

“When you were at the convention, you mentioned that you’d cleared off your desk that last day. You said that was uncharacteristic.”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes, you did.”

“I may have exaggerated. For effect. I mean, you appear at a convention, there’s always a little show business involved, right?”

“And you removed everything that was in your accounts.”

“Yes. Well, that does sound as if I was thinking about leaving.”

“Any chance you might have committed suicide?”

“I had everything to live for. A good career. I was still relatively young. Only in my sixties. In good health. I was in a position to help a number of causes that needed assistance.”

“Which causes?”

“At the time, I was active in efforts to improve public education. And I was helping the Kern Group raise money.” The Kern Group was a nonprofit organization that sent volunteers and supplies to places like Talios, where famine was common. (Talios, of course, was not on Rimway. Not many people ever miss a meal on Rimway.) “And I’d recently met a woman.”

Ivy Cumming. After Taliaferro’s disappearance Ivy waited a few years before giving up and marrying an academic. She eventually gave birth to two children, and was herself still alive.

“No,” he said. “I was ambushed. I understand how it looks, about the bank accounts. But I still don’t think I’d have gone voluntarily.”

I’d dropped by Windy’s apartment shortly after the bombing to see how she was doing. By then she was on her way to recovery. The day after I talked with Taliaferro’s avatar, Alex announced he thought it incumbent on him to pay a visit.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I want to reassure myself she’s okay.”

“She’s fine.”

“I should let her see I’m concerned.”

“We sent her flowers. I stopped by. I can’t see there’s much point. But if you really want to-”

“Civic obligation,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

So we went. She was back at work by then, and the only trace of the injury was a blue cane left in a corner of the office. From her window, had she been so minded, she could have watched construction bots clearing off the last of the debris of what had been Proctor Union.

We’d brought candy, which Alex presented with a flourish. He could be a charmer when he wanted. She was receptive, and you would have thought they were the best of friends. There was no sign of the annoyance I’d seen over our refusal to return the artifacts.

We talked trivia for a few minutes. Windy had gone back to playing squabble, which required good legs. And gradually we worked around to our real reason for coming. Alex segued into it by mentioning that he’d just finished Edward Hunt’s Riptides, a history of the various social movements of the last century. An entire chapter was dedicated to Taliaferro. “Did you know,” he asked innocently, “that he was supposed to be on the Polaris? ”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That’s right. If you look at the pre-op passenger manifest, you’ll see his name.”

“What happened?”

“Some last-minute thing. I don’t know.”

“The last minute-”

“They were loading up and getting ready to leave.”

“And you have no idea at all why he backed out?”

“No. The story was that he got a call, some sort of problem at the office. But I don’t know the source. And you won’t find it recorded anywhere.”

“Were there any problems at Survey at the time? Something so serious that he’d have canceled out?”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing on the logs for that date. There were calls to Skydeck during the departure, but nothing official. It was all just to wish everyone good luck.”

“Maybe it was personal,” I said.

“He told Mendoza it was a call from the office.” She was bored with the subject.

“Of course, it could have been personal. Could have been something they were just relaying. Does it matter?”

“Do we know,” Alex persisted, “whether he returned to the Survey offices that day?”

“The day the Polaris left? I really have no idea, Alex.” She tried to look as if her head was beginning to hurt. “Look,” she said, “we have no record of the call. And it was all a long time ago.”

I asked Jacob what we had on Chek Boland.

Boland’s specialty was the mind-body problem, and his tack had been that we’d always been deceived by the notion of duality, of body and soul, of the mind as an incorporeal entity distinct from the brain. Despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, people still clung to the old notion.

Boland had done the breakthrough work, mapping the brain, showing why its more abstract functions were holographic rather than embedded in a specific location.

Why they were part and parcel of the way a brain was supposed to function.

Boland had been the youngest of Maddy’s passengers. He had dark eyes and looked like one of those guys who spent two or three hours at the gym every day. I watched him in the visual record, watched interviews, presentations at luncheons, watched him accept awards. The Penbrook. The Bennington. The Kamal. He was self-deprecating, easygoing, inclined to give credit to his colleagues. It appeared that everybody liked him.

Despite his accomplishments, he seems to be best known as the onetime mindwipe expert, who worked with law enforcement agencies for thirteen years to correct, as they put it, persons inclined to habitual or violent criminal behavior.

Eventually, he resigned, and later he became an opponent of the technique. I found a record of his addressing a judicial association about a year after he’d terminated his own law enforcement career. “It’s akin to murder,” he said. “We destroy the extant personality and replace it with another, created by the practitioner.

We implant false memories. And no part of the original person survives. None. He is as dead as if we’d dropped him out of an aircraft.”

But he’d spent thirteen years performing the procedure. If that was the way he felt, why did he not resign sooner? “I thought it was useful work,” he said in an interview. “It was satisfying, because I felt I was removing someone’s felonious characteristics and replacing them with inclinations that would make him, and everyone who had to deal with him, happier. I was taking a criminal off the streets and returning a decent, law-abiding citizen. It was painless. We reassured the victim that everything would be fine, and he would be back out in the world again by dinnertime. That was what I told them. Out by dinnertime. And then, God help me, I took their lives.

“I can’t answer the question why I was so slow to accept the reality of what I was doing. If there is a judgment, I hope I’ll be dealt with in a more lenient manner than I have dealt with others. I can only say now that I urge you to consider legislation banning this barbaric practice.”