Seeker

TWENTY-THREE

…Granted in recognition of exemplary achievement in the service of mankind…

- From the inscription on Survey’s Person of the Year Award Shep showed up at Rainbow looking handsome and very much the man of the evening.

He brought a data chip and a couple of books. “I have some information on Samantha,” he said. “I also thought you’d enjoy watching the departure of the Seeker.”

“You have that?” I asked, delighted.

He held the chip in his palm. “Hologram record,” he said. “Reconstructed. From December 27, 2688.”

I was anxious to see it, but he shook his head. “Dinner first,” he said.

“Why can’t we take a quick look now?”

“Because this way you have to invite me up.”

“Shep,” I said, “the facilities are better at the office.”

He grinned. It was a splendid, clean, hold-nothing-back smile. “I doubt it,” he said.

So we ate at the Porch Light, and I took him back to my apartment.

We watched colonists trek through the narrow concourses of an antiquated space station. The Seeker had been too big to dock, so passengers were taken to it twenty at a time by shuttle. According to the narrator, it had required almost a week to lift nine hundred people into orbit and transfer them to the ship. They were all ages, not just young, as I’d expected. And there were lots of kids. Some trailed balloons and chased each other around; others were in tears. Reluctant to leave home, I guess.

A reporter conducted interviews. Everything had been translated into standard. They were headed for a new frontier, they were saying, and life was going to be better. I was surprised to hear that they expected relations between the colony and the home world eventually to be established. “After we get things up and running.” Up and running seemed to be the catchphrase.

I’d had the impression the colonists had all been well-off. That they were a moneyed class. But the people in the visual record looked ordinary.

There didn’t seem to be any well-wishers present to see them off. I assumed that melancholy fact rose from the cost of riding up to the station, which must have been considerably more expensive than it is today. Good-byes would have been said on the ground. Still, there was something lonely and dispiriting in that final departure.

A white placard had been left on a seat. I couldn’t read the ancient inscription, but the translator gave it to me: Margolia or Bosom.

It made no sense. Still doesn’t.

The last few filed up a narrow ramp and boarded the shuttle. The hatches closed, and the shuttle slipped away, while a correspondent talked about new pioneers.

Then we were standing in a room with a fireplace where several people discussed “the significance of it all.” The significance of it all seemed mostly to be gloom and doom.

The colonists were malcontents. Their good sense was questionable, as were their patriotism, their motives, and even their morals. They were putting loved ones in danger. Failing to support a government to which all owed gratitude and allegiance.

“It’s the kids I feel sorry for.”

After a few minutes we were back on the space station, looking out a wall-sized viewport at the Seeker. It was tethered fore and aft to supply units. Fuel and electrical cables had been run out to it. The shuttle was pulling away from its airlock, starting back.

The correspondent returned: “So the largest single group of off-world colonists ever to leave us at one time is embarked and ready to go. And this is only part of the first wave. The Bremerhaven will be leaving for the same destination, wherever that might be, at the end of next month.”

Tethers and cables were being cast off. Auxiliary thrusters fired, and the giant ship began to move away.

“In four days,” the voice-over continued, “the Seeker will enter the mysterious realm we call hyperspace. And ten months from now, God willing, they’ll arrive at their new home. And in two years, the Seeker is scheduled to be back to pick up another contingent.”

The correspondent was standing in the space station. He was gray, intense, pretentious, melodramatic. Behind him, the concourse was empty. “Chairman Hoskin issued a statement this morning,” he said, “expressing his hope that the people departing today will find God’s blessing in their enterprise. He has offered to send assistance, should the colonists request it. Although he admits the distances involved would present problems. Other sources within the administration, who declined to be named, commented that the Republic is better off without the travelers, that, and I’m quoting here, ‘these were people who would never have been satisfied until they were able to impose their godless ideology on the rest of us.’ “Tonight at nine, Howard Petrovna will be a guest on the Lucia Brent Show to discuss whether the colonists will be able to make it on their own.”

I could still see the Seeker through the viewport. It was turning away. Moving into the night.

“Back to you, Sabrina,” the correspondent said. “This is Ernst Meindorf at the Seeker launch.”

One of the books was a hostile biography of a singer named Amelia who was apparently well-known at the time of the departure. She threw in her lot with the Margolians and left with the first wave, had been among the people I’d been watching.

She abandoned a lucrative career and apparently became a legend for doing so. But for years afterward, there were sightings of her around the world, as though she’d never gone.

Her biographer discounted that possibility, of course, and portrayed her as a darling of those persons who thought society had become repressive. “The government provides everyone with comfortable circumstances and a decent income,” she is quoted as saying. “And we have consequently abandoned ourselves to its dictates. We don’t live anymore; we simply exist. We enjoy the entertainments, we pretend we are happy, and we take our satisfaction from our piety and our moral superiority over the rest of the world.” But, argues the biographer, instead of fighting the good fight, she abandoned the cause and fled into the outer darkness “with Harry Williams and his ilk.” It was cowardly, he argues, but it was understandable. I wondered how anxious he would have been to stand against Chairman Hoskin.

“Unlikely,” said Shep. “People used to disappear. Sometimes, when you came back, you were somebody else. Sometimes you didn’t come back. You raised a fuss, you took your chances.”

The singer had been taken into custody on several occasions, usually for something called “inciting to dissatisfaction.” The author, who lived a hundred years later in better times, comments that she would have been subjected to personality reorganization “to make her happier,” except that she was too well known, and there would have been a political price.

The account ends with Amelia’s departure on the Seeker.

The other book was The Great Emigration, written early in the Fourth Millennium. It covered the movement over three centuries of disaffected groups to off-world sites.

The author explained the motivation for each group, provided portraits of its leaders and histories of the resultant colonies, all of which eventually failed.

Several of the emigrations were larger than the Margolian effort, although they tended to be spread over longer periods of time. The factor that made the Margolians unique was their secrecy, their determination not to be ruled from, or even influenced by, terrestrial political forces.

The book had a picture of Samantha and Harry. She was on horseback while Harry, holding the reins, stood gazing up at her. The caption read: Cult leader Harry Williams with girlfriend Samantha Alvarez at her parents’ farm near Wilmington, Delaware. June 2679. Nine years before the departure of the first wave. She was about twenty, laughing, standing on the stirrups. She was considerably smaller than Harry, with long auburn hair cut well below her shoulders. And not bad to look at.

She could have had her pick of guys down at the club.

There wasn’t much else, about her, or the Margolians. The book was sympathetic to government efforts to placate the people the author consistently referred as disgruntled. There had been concern, he said, at the highest levels of government for the colonists, who would be “far from home,” “determined to proceed on their own,” and “in the hands of well-meaning but irresponsible leaders.”

There had been “government efforts to placate” the Margolians, he said, although these seemed to consist mostly of promises not to prosecute. The offenses that were laid at the door of Williams and his associates consisted generally of charges like “disruption of the common welfare.” He’d been imprisoned twice.

“I couldn’t find anything about the sons,” he said.

“Okay. At least we have a picture now to go with Samantha’s name.”

“She was lovely.”

“Yes.”

“Like you, Chase.”

One of the problems guys always have in a strange apartment is that they don’t know how to turn down the lights.

I showed him.

Alex and I met Windy, at her invitation and Survey’s expense, next evening at Parkwood’s, which is located at a posh country club on the river. I never really felt at home in these places. They’re too formal and too proprietary. You always get the sense that people are too busy being impressed (and trying to be impressive) to enjoy themselves.

True to form, Windy had gotten there first. “Good to see you guys,” she said, as we rolled in. “I have to tell you that the people at Survey are absolutely knocked out by your work, Alex.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“I have some news for you.” He leaned forward. “You’re going to be named Survey’s Person of the Year. At our annual ceremony.”

Alex beamed. “Thank you for letting me know.”

“There’ll be a gala. On the eleventh. Can you make it?”

“Sure. Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Good. And of course I need not remind you that this is strictly not for publication.

We’ll make an announcement later this week.”

“Of course.”

The drinks came, and we toasted the Person of the Year. The table was relatively quiet, considering the things that had been happening. Maybe the news that Margolia was nothing but a jungle had dampened Windy’s spirits. Or maybe she was planning to use the evening to negotiate Survey’s rights to the find. We were still waiting for our food to arrive when the operations chief wandered in and pretended to be surprised we were there. “Great show,” he told us. “Magnificent job, Alex.” He was a little man who waved his arms a lot. “When you go back,” he said, “I’d like very much to go with you.”

I looked at Alex. Had he told someone he was going back? He read my expression and signaled no.

And then came Jean Webber, from the board of directors. “They’ll be putting your statue up in the Rock Garden,” she said. “The way things are going, you’ll be here to see it.”

The Rock Garden was Survey’s Hall of Fame. Plaques and likenesses of the great explorers were installed there, among flowering trees and whispering fountains. But the honor had always been posthumous.

Alex liked to play the role of a man unaffected by external honors. The only thing that was important to him, he liked to say, was knowing he’d accomplished something worthwhile. But it wasn’t true, of course. He liked accolades as much as the next guy.

When the plaudits had poured in for his work during the Christopher Sim affair, he’d been delighted. Just as he was hurt by the reaction of some who claimed he had done more harm than good and should have left things alone.

I had no trouble picturing Alex, with his collar pulled up to hide his identity, slipping into the grotto at night to admire his statue, while claiming by day that it was all nonsense.

They brought our food, fish for him and Windy, fruit dish for me. The wine flowed, and I began to wonder if Windy was trying to lower our resistance. The evening began to take on a pleasant buzz.

Until Louis Ponzio wandered in. He was Survey’s director, and a man whom Alex found hard to stomach. Alex was usually pretty good at masking his reactions, favorable and unfavorable, to other people. But he seemed to struggle with Ponzio, who was a self-important, squeaky, artificially cheerful type. The kind of guy, Alex once said, who, when he was in school, was probably routinely attacked by the other kids. But Ponzio never seemed to notice.

“Well done, Alex,” he said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “You really put on a show this time.”

“Thank you. We seem to have been very fortunate.”

Ponzio looked at me, tried to remember my name, gave up, and turned to Windy. She took her cue. “Dr. Ponzio,” she said, “you remember Chase Kolpath. Alex’s associate.”

“Of course,” he said. “Who could forget one so lovely?”

Who, indeed?

He didn’t stay. We hadn’t yet worked out all the details of the rights transfer for the Seeker and for Margolia. And I suppose he was smart enough to realize that Survey had its best shot at an outright grant by his staying clear and letting Windy handle things.

He would have been right. During the course of the evening, Windy negotiated access and salvage rights to the Seeker and to Margolia. Alex retained the right to make a return voyage and bring back more artifacts, although he accepted limits.

Windy made notes, drank her wine, and put away the fish, pretty much in tandem.

And she did it with a flourish. “Very good,” she said, as we finished. “One more thing:

We’re going to mount an expedition posthaste. We’ll want you to sit down with the people running the mission and give them all the help you can.”

“Sure,” said Alex, “I’ll be happy to.”

“And, Alex-?”

“Yes.”

“I know this hasn’t entirely turned out the way you would have preferred. But there’s a bigger payoff. This is a monumental find. Whatever happens from here on, you’re up there with Schliemann and Matsui and McMillan.”