Seeker (18 page)

The cab touched down, the kids cheered, and I disembarked. She introduced the children. They wanted to look inside the cab, so I held it a minute before paying up. Then they ran off, accompanied by a peremptory warning from their mother not to go far, dinner’s about ready. Delia looked proudly after them until they disappeared into a cluster of trees. “It’s a long way from Andiquar,” she said, “but I’m glad you could make it.”

“I had a good book,” I said.

We went inside. It was a showy home, with high ceilings, lots of original art, marble floors. “My husband’s away on business,” she said. “He asked me to tell you he was sorry not to be here.”

She directed me into a sitting room. It was small, cozy, obviously the place where the family hung out. Two armchairs, a sofa, and a dark-stained coffee table, on which stood a metal box. Music was being piped in. I recognized Bullet Bob and the Ricochets.

“I know you’re anxious to hear why I asked you to come,” she said. “After you asked me about the
Seeker
, I called my aunt Melisa. She took care of me after my folks died. She didn’t know anything about a discovery, but she and my father weren’t all that close anyhow. Aunt Melisa wasn’t interested much in outer space.

“I’d talked to her as I told you I would, and she said at first there wasn’t anything we’d care about. From my parents. But she went looking and she called me the other day to tell me about something she’d found.” Delia indicated the box.

I followed her gaze and she nodded. Open it.

Folded inside was a white shirt wrapped in plastic. It was marked with the same eagle emblem I’d seen on the cup. “Beautiful,” I said.

“Melisa tells me she remembers now that there was other stuff. Clothes, boots, electronic gear. Data disks.”

“My God. What happened to it?”

“It got tossed. She said she kept it a few years, but it looked old, and the electronics didn’t seem to do anything, weren’t compatible with anything, and she couldn’t see any reason to store it. She kept the shirt as a memento.”

“Did she get rid of the disks, too?”

“She says everything went.” She sighed. Me, too. “Which brings us to the other reason I wanted to talk to you.” She looked worried.

“Okay.”

“If you’re right, if they really did discover the
Seeker
, they must not have reported it. It’s going to turn out my parents hid information from Survey.”

“Yes,” I said. “Actually, that’s the way it looks.”

“How serious is that?”

“I don’t know.” I told her why we thought they’d have kept it quiet. That they might have felt it was necessary to protect the artifact. I put the best light on it I could. But Delia was no dummy.

“No matter,” she said. “If that’s what happened, it won’t look good.”

“Probably not.”

“Chase, I don’t want to be part of anything that’s going to harm their reputations.” She paused. Looked around the room. “You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m not sure where I go from here.”

“I’ll do what I can to protect them,” I said.

“But you won’t be able to do much, will you?”

“Probably not,” I admitted.

On the way home, I watched
Insertion
, the classic horror show in which superphysical emotionless humans from Margolia have infiltrated the Confederacy. They’ve come to regard the rest of us as impediments to progress, which they define in terms of enhanced intelligence and a “higher” set of moral values. These, of course, don’t seem to include prohibitions against murdering people who discover the secret or simply get in the way.

If you’ve seen it, you haven’t forgotten the desperate chase through the skyways and towers of New York City, during which the narrative’s hero, fleeing a dozen bloodthirsty Margolians, tries to get to the authorities to warn them. En route he has to use lubricating oil, electrical circuits, an automatic washer, and several other devices, to escape. The Margolians could do all the superintelligent double talk they wanted, and bend metal, and the rest of it, but when it came to the crunch, it was obvious that good old native Confederate ingenuity would win out every time. I especially liked the lubricant gig, which he used to send one of his pursuers sliding off a partly constructed terrace.

I don’t care for horror shows. In this one, twenty or so people are killed off in an astonishingly wide range of ways, most involving lots of blood, gouging, and impaling. (I couldn’t figure out why the Margolians carried those long pokers when they could far more easily dispatch folks with scramblers.) That’s a lot more murder victims than I can normally tolerate in an evening. But I wanted to get a sense of what other people had been making of the Margolian story.

Well, there you are.
Insertion
was fun, in a childish way. But it seemed unlikely anything like that could actually happen.

We are leaving this world forever, and we intend to go so far that not even God will be able to find us.
— Ascribed to Harry Williams
(Remarks as Margolians prepared to depart Earth)

I’d taken pictures of the white shirt to show Alex. “You think it’s legitimate?” he asked.

“No way to be sure just looking at it. But she’d have no reason to lie.”

“I guess.” Alex couldn’t restrain a smile that illuminated the entire room. “Chase, I can hardly believe it. But we really do have a ship out there.”

“Pity we don’t have the Wescotts’ data disks.”

“The aunt really threw them out?”

“That’s what Delia says.”

“Did you check with her? With the aunt?”

“No. I didn’t see any reason to.”

“Do it. Maybe she kept
something
. Maybe she knows where they were taken. Maybe we can still find them.”

“You’re sounding desperate, Alex.”

But I made the calls. Delia gave me the aunt’s code. The aunt wondered if I’d lost my mind. “Put them in the trash thirty years ago,” she said.

The earliest serious efforts to settle other worlds had been made two hundred years before the
Seeker
and
Bremerhaven
flights. The pioneers, according to the history books, had been driven, not by desperation, but by a sense of adventure, of wanting to escape the monotonous and sometimes deadly routines of civilization. They’d hoped to make their fortunes on a remote frontier. They’d gone out to Sirius, and Groombridge, Epsilon Eridani, and 61 Cygni.

Those first interstellars had been slow, requiring months to make the relatively short flights to nearby stars. But thousands of people had gone, taken their families, and settled worlds deemed to be hospitable.

But none of those early efforts had prospered.

The colonies, theoretically self-supporting, encountered difficulties, weather cycles, viruses, crop failures, for which they were unable to make adjustments. Technological assistance from the home world, at first steady, became sporadic, and eventually went away.

The survivors came home.

The first successful settlement, in the sense that it actually prospered, waited another thousand years. Eight centuries after the Margolian effort.

The
Seeker
had been designed originally, during a burst of unbridled optimism, to move whole populations to colony worlds. On the Margolian mission it was captained by Taja Korinda, who had been the pilot of the
LaPierre
when it discovered a living world in the Antares system. Her second chair was Abraham Faulkner. Faulkner had been a politician at one time, had seen where things were going, and switched careers so that, if the legend was true, he could get out when he needed to.

I found holograms of Korinda and Faulkner. When I showed them to Alex, he commented that Korinda looked like me. She was an attractive woman, and it was Alex’s ham-handed way of passing a compliment. He’s good with the clients, but for whatever reason when he gets around to me he seems to have problems.

Faulkner looked the part of a guy with a mind of his own. Big, brawny, wide shoulders, obviously accustomed to command. About forty. The kind of guy you took seriously.

“But Harry’s the one we want to talk to,” said Alex. “He’s the heart and soul of the Margolians.” There weren’t any avatars back that far. But Jacob could assemble one from what was known about Williams. The problem was that it might not be very accurate. But then that was always the problem with avatars.

“There is not a wealth of data,”
Jacob complained.
“And the validity of what is known about Williams is suspect.”

“Do the best you can,” Alex said.

“It will take a few minutes. I have to make some judgment calls.”

“Good. Let me know when it’s ready.” Alex seemed distracted that morning. While he waited, he wandered around the house straightening chairs and adjusting curtains. He stopped in front of one of the bookcases and stared at the volumes.

“You all right, Alex?” I asked him.

“Of course.” He strolled over to a window and gazed out at a ruddy, cloud-swept sky.

“You’re thinking about the disks.”

“Yes. Idiot woman throws them out.”

“Not her fault,” I said. “She had no way of knowing.”

He nodded. “Lucky she didn’t toss the shirt.”

“Do you think,” I said, “there’s any possibility the colony might have survived? Might still be out there somewhere?”

“The Margolians? After nine thousand years?” He looked wistful. “It would be nice to find something like that. But no. There’s no chance.”

Stupid question. Had they lived, how would you explain the fact nobody had heard from them in all that time? “If they
were
out there, it might be they wouldn’t want to be found.”

“If trees could fly,” he said.

“If I were writing a novel,” I said, “they’d have arranged the earthquake that killed the Wescotts and ended their search.”

“And why would they want to keep their existence secret?”

“We’re barbarians in their eyes.”

“Speak for yourself, Chase.” He made a sound deep in his throat and lowered himself onto the sofa. “They not only died out, but they must have gone quickly.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because later generations wouldn’t have shared the grudge Harry Williams and his friends had. It just wouldn’t have happened. They’d have gotten back in touch. At some point. It would have been to everyone’s benefit.” His eyes slid shut. “They’d have had to. For one thing, after a few centuries, they’d have been as curious about us as we are about them. But the colony site is out there somewhere. And I’ll tell you, Chase, if we can bring back some artifacts from
that
, we are going to make some serious cash.”

There was a long silence. I became gradually aware of someone standing behind me, near the office door. It was a tall, dark-skinned man of middle age, dressed in clothing from another century. Cream-colored vest, loose black shirt open to the navel, the sort of white slacks you might wear at sea. Everything a bit more garish than you could get away with today. He smiled, looked at me, then at Alex, and said hello in the deepest baritone I’d ever heard.

“Harry Williams,” said Alex, sitting up.

“At your pleasure, sir. And, Chase, I would not be too quick to dismiss the possibility they survived.”
He crossed the room, and took a seat in the armchair closest to Alex.
“Do you think you can find the colony world?”

I froze the picture. “Alex, I understood no likeness of him had survived.”

“You just have to persevere.” He grinned. “Never give up. That’s my motto.”

“Where’d you find it?”

“In fact, there are a few of them. This one came from a set of memoirs by a contemporary.”

The guy looked good. Noble aspect and all that. I could understand why people were willing to follow him. Even to distant places that didn’t have restaurants. Alex flipped through his notebook and reactivated Harry. “The goal was ‘to create free minds in a free society.’ Right, Harry?”

“Your words?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Noble sentiment.”

He nodded. “
Unfortunately, the truth is it’s pure hyperbole. Nobody lives in a free society
.”

“We do.”

“I doubt it. We all believe what our parents believed. You get filled up during the first few years when the mind is open to everything, and you assume adults know what’s going on. So you’re vulnerable. And if later on you decide to reject the local mythology, whatever it might be, you pay a price. Parents frown, old friends are shocked, you get ostracized. There’s no such thing as a completely free society.”
A sofa appeared and he unwound into it.

“You’re not talking about us,” I said.

He smiled. “
Freedom’s an illusion
.”

We looked at one another across the expanse of the office. At that moment we might have been separated by light-years. Alex grinned at me. Are you really going to argue philosophy with
this
guy?

I plowed ahead. “Harry, aren’t we exaggerating a trifle?”

“We’re tribal, Chase. We talk about freedom, but you better not say things the tribe doesn’t care to hear. Or act outside approved norms.”

“For example?”

“I don’t know where I am.”
He looked around the room, at the antiques on display for clients. At the several framed commendations.
“You collect artifacts.”

“Yes.”

“That is your profession.”

“That’s correct,” I said.

“On-site? You recover some of them personally?”

That much was evident from the framed scroll presented us by Coryn University. “Yes. Sometimes.”

He looked over at Alex. “
Have you and your associate been accused of being grave robbers
?”

“That’s very good,” Alex said.

“So much for your free society.”

“That’s different.”

“How is it different? You’re making an honest living, are you not? But there’s this tribal instinct about burial places being sacrosanct. Unless you work for a museum.”