Seeker

EIGHT

Might the Harry Williams group have succeeded in building a society that had actually banished the various imbecilities that have always plagued us? The reflex is to say no, that it could not be done so long as human nature itself remained unchanged. But this view denies that we can learn from history, that we can sidestep the inquisitions, dictatorships, and bloodletting of past ages. That the programing of false values into our young can be stopped. That people can learn to live reasonably. If they were able to establish themselves on their chosen world, and to pass on their ideals to succeeding generations, if they could avoid forgetting who they were, then success might have been achieved. Maybe we have not heard from them since their departure six centuries ago because they did not want to be contaminated. I’d like to believe it’s so.

- Kosha Malkeva,

The Road to Babylon, 3376 C.E.

The administrative offices of the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research were located in a complex of glass-and-plasteel buildings on the north side of Andiquar, along the banks of the Narakobi. Its operational center was halfway across the continent, but it was here that policy was set, politicians were entertained, missions approved, and resources allocated. This was where personnel decisions were made and where researchers came to present and ultimately defend their projects. The public information branch was located here, and this was where the records were kept.

The grounds were mostly parkland, although in midwinter the place looked a bit desolate. There was a move on to put a dome over the entire complex, but the proposal, as of this writing, is still stalled in committee somewhere.

The visitors’ space was filled, so I dropped down onto a parking area half a kilometer away and walked in. We’d had a break in the weather, and it was almost warm, with a hazy sun and a few clouds spread across a yellow sky. There were a few people out with their kids, and I passed a chess game being played by two shivering middle-aged guys on one of the benches. Ahead, I could see the three-story parabolically shaped Trainor Building that housed the personnel offices. To my left, in a cluster of trees, was the Central Annex, which looked more like a temple than a structure intended for scientific research. The Annex housed Survey’s museum and exhibits.

I veered right, strolling past stone memorials to old glories, circled the Eternal Fountain (which is supposed to symbolize the notion that exploration will never cease, or that the universe goes on forever, or something like that), passed a couple of bureaucratic types arguing and looking annoyed, and approached the Kolman building, which housed Survey’s director and his immediate staff.

I climbed the eleven steps at the front entrance. Alex tells me they signify the eleven interstellars that formed the original Survey fleet. Eight Doric columns supported the roof. At the far end of the portico, a child was charging down the steps with a red kite in tow while his mother watched.

The front doors opened onto a stiff, uncomfortable lobby, filled with plants and armchairs and tables. It had a vaulted ceiling and a long array of windows, both real and virtual. They were framed by lush silver curtains. The walls were lined with paintings of Survey vessels cruising past exploding suns or serene ring systems, and of people getting out of landers and standing heroically gazing across alien landscapes.

PUTNAM ARRIVES ON HELIOTROP IV, an attached plate said. Or, THE JAMES P. HOSKINS DOCKS AT STARDANCE. It was the kind of place specifically designed to make the occasional visitor feel insignificant.

And there stood Windy, in conversation with someone I didn’t know. She saw me, waved, and signaled me to wait. A moment later she came over. “Social call?” she asked.

“Not this time. I just wanted to get authorization to look at some records.”

“Can I help?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Good.” She smiled. “By the way, did you ever figure out who the thief was?”

“At Gideon V? No. We have no idea.”

“I checked on this end. There were several people who had access to my report.”

“Okay.”

“I’m sorry. There’s a good chance that’s where things went wrong.”

“Well, we’ll know better next time.”

“It infuriates me,” she said.

“Let it go.”

“Well, I can’t quite do that. Not if we have someone giving out information that allows people to descend on archeological sites.” Her mouth was a thin line. God help whoever it was if she caught him. “What did you want to see?”

Adam Wescott had completed a total of fourteen missions for Survey over a fifteenyear period, beginning in 1377 and ending in 1392.

I started with the most recent and worked backward through each of the missions he’d shared with Margaret. That might have been overkill, but I didn’t want to miss anything.

Most of the Survey flights are general purpose. You pick a group of stars, go in, take pictures, get sensor readings, measure everything in sight, and move on. Adam had a special interest in the mechanics of G-class stars as they approach their heliumburning phase. Three of his missions, including the last one, had been focused on that subject. That wasn’t to say they didn’t also look at other aspects of the central luminary and also survey the planetary system. But helium was the watchword.

Consequently, all the stars on the itinerary were old.

I visited every system with them. I looked at the images, paged through the details of each sun, its gravity constant, mass, temperature ranges, whatever. And of course I got to see the planetary families. During their joint career, they’d found four living worlds, one their first time out together, one on the third mission, and two on their seventh. I heard their voices, his low in the register, the voice of a professional researcher, always calm and methodical, hers soft and subdued, much in contrast, I thought, to her take-command appearance.

I heard them on the one occasion when they thought they’d discovered evidence of intelligence, in a forest that looked remarkably like a city. They’d retained the professional tone, but I could feel the electricity. Until, a few minutes later, they realized they were looking at something quite natural. Then the disappointment was evident.

There probably is somebody else out there. Other than the Mutes. But there are just so many places to look. Some experts think that, by the time we find a third player, we’ll have evolved away from being human.

Nowhere was there any mention of a derelict, or of Margolia.

I made a copy of the record. Next I needed somebody with some insight into Survey procedures.

Shara Michaels was an astrophysicist, employed on Survey’s analytical staff. Her responsibility was to advise upper management about submitted projects: which were worth pursuing, which could be put on the waiting list, and which could be safely dismissed.

I’d gone to school with her, partied with her, and even introduced her to a future husband. A future ex, as things turned out, but we’d remained friends through it all although in recent years we hadn’t seen much of each other.

She’d been the queen of the walk in those early days, the woman you didn’t want your date to see. Blond hair cut in an elfin style, sea-blue eyes, and a talent for mischief. Everybody loved her.

She still looked good when she came to the door of her office. But the old cavalier attitude had disappeared. She was all business. Polite, glad to see me, commented how we needed to get together once in a while. But there was a level of reserve her younger self had never known.

“You should have called,” she said, showing me to a chair and taking one herself.

“You almost missed me. I was on my way out the door.”

“I hadn’t expected to come by today, Shara,” I said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

“For you? Sure. What’s going on?”

“Alex has had me on the run. I was over at the archives.”

“Still doing slave labor?”

“Pretty much.” We did several minutes’ worth of small talk. Then I got down to cases.

“I need your help.”

She got drinks for us. Wine from the islands. “Name it.”

“I’ve been looking at some old mission reports. From forty years ago.”

“Why?” she asked. “What are you looking for?”

“Survey used to have a husband-and-wife team, Adam and Margaret Wescott. There’s a possibility they found something unusual on one of the missions.”

“People often find unusual things on the missions.” She meant planets with odd orbits or gas giants with unusual mixes of, say, carbon and methane.

I looked at her over the rim of my glass. “No,” I said. “Not like that.”

“Like what, then?”

“Like an artifact. A derelict ship. Connected with Margolia.”

“With what?”

“Margolia.”

She still had a great smile. “You’re kidding.”

“Shara, a woman showed up at our place a week or so ago with a drinking cup that might be from the Seeker.” When the frown reappeared, I explained.

When I’d finished, she looked amused. Maybe disappointed that I could jump to an obviously silly conclusion. “Chase,” she said, “anybody can manufacture a cup.”

“It’s nine thousand years old, love.” Her eyes widened. “We’ve been able to trace it back to Wescott. It was taken from his home in the 1390s. By a burglar.”

“But you don’t know where Wescott got it?”

“No.”

“He probably bought it somewhere. Do you have reason to suspect it actually came off the ship? Or from”-she couldn’t suppress a smile-“Margolia.”

“It’s a possibility.”

“A remote one.”

Her office was on the third level. The walls were decorated with pictures of stars in collision. That was her specialty. She’d done her thesis on interstellar traffic accidents and remained disappointed that she’d come along too late to see the crash between Delta Karpis and a dwarf star sixty years earlier.

One image was particularly striking. It was a computer graphic done from behind and above a yellow star that was about to do a head-on with a white mass of some sort. A dwarf, probably. “How often do these things happen?” I asked.

“Collisions? There’s always one going on somewhere. There’s one happening at this moment. Somewhere in the observable universe.”

“Well, the observable universe is pretty big.”

“I was just trying to answer your question.”

“It’s still a lot of wreckage,” I admitted. “I’ve only heard of one in my life.”

“The Polaris incident.”

“Yes.”

She smiled again, letting me know how uninformed I was. “They happen all the time, Chase. We don’t see much of it around here because we’re pretty spread out. Thank God. Stars never get close to one another. But go out into some of the clusters-” She stopped and thought about it. “If you draw a sphere around the sun, with a radius of one parsec, you know how many other stars will fall within that space?”

“Zero,” I said. “Nothing’s close.” In fact the nearest star was Formega Ti, six lightyears out.

“Right. But you go out to one of the clusters, like maybe the Colizoid, and you’d find a half million stars crowded into that same sphere.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I never kid, Chase. They bump into one another all the time.” I tried to imagine it.

Wondered what the night sky would look like in such a place. Probably never got dark.

“I have a question for you,” I said.

She tucked a wisp of hair back in place. “I thought you might.”

“If I want to do a mission, I come to you with a plan. You look at it, and if it’s okay, you approve it, assign me a ship and pilot, and I’m on my way. That’s the way it works, right?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the essence of it, yes.”

“Okay. The plan I submit tells you which star systems I want to look at. It includes a flight plan, and, if there are special reasons for the mission, it mentions those also. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I used to do the preliminary missions. And I know there were follow-up flights, with specialists.”

She nodded.

“How often? If I came back from a mission on which I’d visited, say, a dozen systems, what are the chances somebody would actually go back and look at one them?”

“Usually, you could expect maybe half of them would get follow-ups.”

“Really? That many?”

“Oh, yes. Sure.”

“So if I found something and wanted to keep it quiet-”

“You’d want to leave that system off the mission report. Substitute something else.”

“But if I did that, you guys would notice, right?”

Shara looked uncomfortable. “I doubt it. I don’t know how we were doing things thirty, forty years ago. But there’s no reason to backcheck the report against the proposal. Nobody has a reason to lie about any of that, and to my knowledge there’s never been a problem.”

“Do the proposals still exist?”

“From 1390? I doubt it.”

“Would you check for me?”

“Hold on.”

She put the question to the AI. And we both heard the response: “Proposals are retained three years before being discarded.”

“That’s longer than I would have thought we keep them,” she said. “You think the Wescotts found the Seeker and falsified the report?”

“It’s possible.”

“Why would they do that? They’d get full credit.”

“But if they found the Seeker, could Margolia be far away? What would Survey have done if they’d announced their discovery?”

She thought about it. “Oh.”

“That’s right. You’d have assigned a small fleet to go looking for Margolia. So the big discovery would probably get made by someone else.”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“That’s why it doesn’t go into the report, Shara. They wanted to be the ones who found Margolia. Biggest discovery ever. But to do that they had to keep quiet about the Seeker.” I became aware of voices in the corridor. “But the ship’s AI,” I said, “would record where the mission actually went.”

“Yes.”

“So you’d have to doctor that as well, if you were going to falsify the record.”

“Yes.”

“My experience is that it wouldn’t be that hard to make the change.”

“I wouldn’t think so. I’m sure Margaret Wescott would have known how to do it.

Penalties are severe if you get caught, though.”

“But they wouldn’t be likely to get caught.”

“Probably not.”

“Can we get access to the AIs from their missions?”

“No,” she said. “They get wiped periodically. Every few years. I’m not sure of the exact timing, but it’s nowhere near thirty.”

“What did you come up with?” Alex asked, when I’d called in next morning.

“Not much,” I said. I explained, and he said that was what he’d expected. “Alex,” I added, “maybe we’re letting our enthusiasm run away with us.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I have a question.”

“Go ahead.”

“We know which systems they looked at. Or at least, what the claims are.”

“That’s correct.”

“Do we know what the order of the star systems was on each flight? Where they went first, where next, and so on?”

I looked at the records and shook my head. “Negative.”

“It would be nice to know.”

“Why? What does it matter?”

“It always helps to have a complete picture of what happened.” He scratched his temple. “By the way, Fenn tells me they did find more burglary records. The Wescotts were among them. And the report included the cup.”

“So Amy will have to give it up.”

“I’m afraid so. But it tells us the Wescotts understood it was more than just a drinking cup.”

“But that still doesn’t lead to anything.”

“Maybe not.” He looked hesitant.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Amy called to tell me she’d talked with Hap.”

“She told him about what’s been happening?”

“Yep. I think she was taking a little revenge. Telling him how much the cup was worth so he’d eat his heart out.”

“And-?”

“Apparently he got annoyed. Started making threats. Against her and against us.”

“Against us? She told him we were involved?”

“By name. I doubt there’s anything to worry about, but I wanted you to know. Keep your security systems on.”

Next day was my day off, but I wasn’t quite ready to let go of Margolia. I had an early breakfast and settled in to watch Sanctuary, which was a thirty-year-old thriller about the lost colony.

It was one of the Sky Jordan adventures, which were hugely popular in their time. Sky was played throughout that long series by Jason Holcombe, who always struck me as the sexiest leading man in the business. In this one, his ship gets too close to an alien device that sucks the power out of everything, and he’s rescued by Solena, a beautiful Margolian.

She’s played by a popular actress of the period. But I pulled her out, put myself in her place, and settled back to watch the action.

Solena patches up the battered hero, pulls him out of his dead ship, and, using a force shield that negates the power drain, heads for home.

Margolia is a world of gleaming cities and impossible architecture. Its citizens enjoy a life of absolute leisure. (How they’d stand it isn’t explained.) The place looks great.

The mountains are higher, the forests greener, the oceans wilder than anything you might see on Rimway. There are twin suns, which seem to move through the sky together, three or four moons, and a set of rings.

If the Wescotts had found anything like that, I would surely have liked to visit.

But this Margolia is under threat by Bayloks, a horde of malevolent aliens. It was the Bayloks who had planted the power drain. They come complete with lizard snouts and bursts of tentacles and malignant red eyes that glow when the lights go down.

Whatever evolutionary advantage accrued from this, I couldn’t imagine. But they were ugly and stomach-churning in the manner of most special effects monsters.

Despite their advanced technology, the Margolians, because they have been cut off from the rest of the human race for so long, have forgotten how to defend themselves.

They have no warships and no knowledge how to build any. They have nobody trained in the military arts. (At some point, they apparently decided that the armed forces had no place in an enlightened society.) And, to cap things off, they’re averse to killing.

There is also Tangus Korr, who is Solena’s boyfriend. Tangus becomes jealous of Sky and begins plotting against him.

Solena sees through his tricks and casts her lot with the hero, who is meantime providing engineering advice. The aliens are coming fast, and there is a race to put together a defense force. You get a tour of Sky’s new ship, which they name War Eagle. It’s small but of course it packs a wallop.

Solena meantime falls in love with Sky and takes him into her bedroom. It is the night before the face-off with the enemy, and Sky may not come back, probably will not come back. He wants her to stay out of harm’s way, but she won’t have it. In the end, tears running down her cheeks, she releases the clasps on her blouse, opens it wide and gives him a choice. “You want me,” she says, “then promise you will take me with you tomorrow.”

Well, what’s a guy going to do?

I might as well confess right here that my favorite part of these sims is watching myself get taken by the right leading man. I know women generally deny that, at least when there are men in the room, but there isn’t much that gives me a better ride than watching Jason Holcombe perform his magic with me.

Things run off the track a bit when Tangus turns out, incomprehensibly, to be in the pay of the Bayloks. He very nearly destroys the nascent fleet in dock, but after a desperate shoot-out and slugfest with Sky, the ships get safely launched.

What the audience knows, but the Margolians do not, is that the Bayloks can teleport over short distances. At the height of the battle they explode onto the bridge of the War Eagle.

So I’m sitting there, enjoying the action, when one materialized, screeching, fangs bared, directly in front of me. I shrieked and fell out of my chair.

“That’s unnerving,” said Carmen, the AI.

I sat in the middle of the floor, watching the battle rage around the living room. “We need a little more restraint,” I said, “by the people who make these things.”

I slept most of the afternoon, went out for dinner with a friend that evening, and got back just before midnight. I showered and got ready for bed, but paused to look out at the river and the sleepy countryside. I was thinking how fortunate I was, and all the things I was taking for granted. A good job, a good life, and a good place to live it. It wasn’t Margolia, but it had taverns and live theater. And if you bottled yourself up watching sims night after night, whose fault was it?

I killed the lights, draped my robe across a chair, and climbed into bed. The room was dark except for a few squares of moonlight on the floor, and the illuminated face of a clock on top of my bureau. I pulled the blankets up around my shoulders, snuggling down into their luxurious warmth.

Back to the office in the morning.

I was trying not to enumerate the next day’s tasks because that would wake me up, when Carmen told me we had a visitor.

At this hour? I immediately thought of Hap.

“A woman,” she said. I heard voices at the door, Carmen, and someone else. “Chase, she says her name is Amy Kolmer.”

That couldn’t be good news. I reached for a robe. “Let her in,” I said.