Seeker (40 page)

I was becoming famous. Shortly after I entered the home system, the guys in ops told me there was a new sim I’d be interested in seeing. About Margolia. (There were, they said, two or three more in the works. Everybody was rushing to take advantage of the discovery.) Did I want them to relay it to me? It was called
Margolia, Farewell
.

I pretended to think it over. The truth was I thought, from the way they were talking, it was a dramatization of the flight Alex and I had made. So I put on a casual front and said sure, if they had a minute, they could send it.

To my disappointment, it turned out to be a historical epic about the last days of the colony. In this version it was a rogue planet that brought everything to grief.

A lone scientist arrives in the capital and seeks an audience with Harry Williams. The approach of the newly discovered world, he says, will be catastrophic. There’ll be quakes, tidal waves, volcanoes.

“It’s going to alter our orbit,”
he adds.

“Will we survive?”

The scientist is tall, thin, gray, intense. Right out of Central Casting. “
Mr. Director, I do not see reason for hope
.”

“How long do we have?”
asks Williams.

“Fourteen months.”

(The writers either didn’t know or didn’t care that the colonists had had at least three years’ warning.)

His colleagues react angrily, insisting such a thing could not happen. The world on which they stand is six billion years old. What are the odds that something like this would occur only a few decades after they’d arrived?

When the period of denial passes, there’s an effort to determine whose fault it is. Williams takes to the airwaves, announces the finding, and accepts responsibility. “
We are working on a solution
,” he tells his listeners.

There isn’t time to get help. So they decide to put as many people as they can on both ships and send them back to Earth. The watchword becomes
Save the children
! Then, catastrophic news from the engineers: Neither the
Seeker
nor the
Bremerhaven
is capable of making the long flight home.

That produces a second round of recrimination. Again, Harry accepts the blame. “
It was my responsibility
,” he tells the Council. And I thought,
Damn right
.

Ah, yes. Noble Harry. Played by a character actor who specialized in such parts.

We watch the fury when the word gets out. Angry crowds surround government buildings. Williams is driven from his position of leadership.

After a series of loud debates, the decision is taken to strip the
Bremerhaven
, and use its parts to fill in on the
Seeker
, which is the more reliable of the two ships. “
God help us
,” says a technician, “
I’m still not sure it will get home.” Home
has once again become Earth.

At that point, I shut it down. I’ve no taste for downbeat sims, and I knew how this one was going to end.

Alex was waiting at the terminal outside Andiquar when the shuttle set down. “Glad to have you back,” he said. “The work’s been piling up.” Then he laughed as if the comment had been raucously funny. “I take it we were right.”

It was good of him to use the plural. In fact, I’d had no part in it. “Yes,” I said, “there
was
another terrestrial world.”

“Excellent. Were you able to get its orbit?”

“No. There were no details.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

We took the elevator to the roof. It was quiet, the place nearly deserted. “Another terrestrial world,” he said. “That means it was in the biozone.”

“That’s not clear. They didn’t use the standard categories. But they list the makeup of the atmosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen look like the standard mix for a class-K. So I’d say yes, it was in the biozone. Had to be.”

“Good.”

“I still don’t see why it matters. I know what you’re thinking, but they wouldn’t have been dumb enough to retreat to a world that was going to get ripped out of orbit. Surely they would have known what was going to happen.”

We arrived topside, and the doors opened onto a rainy afternoon. We walked out into the dispatch area, flagged a taxi, and headed west.

“Nevertheless, Chase,” he said, “that’s precisely what they did.”

“But it was suicide.”

“So it would seem.” He looked out at the storm as we rose over the city.

Twenty minutes later we walked into the country house. Jacob had coffee and jelly donuts waiting.

“So.” I sat down and treated myself. “What’s next?”

“We need to find the missing world.”

I had known it was coming. “You’re kidding.”

“From a business standpoint, it would bring us a bonanza. Its atmosphere would have frozen when it left the vicinity of its sun. So the surface would have gone void, and artifacts would have been preserved. Mint condition, Chase. And the story of that last group of colonists, if we can establish they actually existed, is going to approach mythic proportions.”

“How do you suggest we find the missing world? I doubt it can be done.”

“That’s your area of expertise, Chase,” he said. “Find a way.”

How do you search for a dark body lost among the stars?

I reviewed what I knew about the state of sensing technology. Not very much, I discovered. So I made some calls and eventually came up with Avol DesPlaine’s name. He was described to me as the best we had on the subject.

I told Jacob to try to get through to him. We left a message, and he returned the call in the morning. He could, he informed me, spare a minute.

He had the darkest skin I’d ever seen. Unless you lived on Earth, skin color hasn’t been a distinguishing feature for thousands of years. There’d been too much intermarriage among those who had headed out from the home world. And the result had been a moderate olive texture for almost everybody. Some were lighter, some darker. But not by much.

DesPlaine was the exception to the rule. I wondered whether he was the product of a few genes that had hung on, or whether he was a recent arrival from Earth. He was a small man, or he sat in the biggest armchair on the planet. It was hard to tell which. “
What may I do for you, Ms. Kolpath
?” he asked.

I explained what I wanted to know. Nine thousand years ago, a planet had been expelled from its solar system during a close pass by an extraneous body. We don’t know which direction it went. “Is there a technology that would help us find it?”

“Sure,”
he said, warming to the subject.
“Of course. But you’re talking about a substantial volume of space. Do you have anything other than what you’ve told me? Anything at all?”
He had a wide skull, a few strands of white hair, and deep-set eyes that never left me.

“No,” I said. “We know which system it got blown out of. That’s about it.”

“I see.”
He scribbled a note. And he didn’t crack a smile, although I sensed that he wanted to.
“How large will the search fleet be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How many ships would be engaged in the operation?”

“One. It’s not a fleet.”

“One.”
Another near smile. Another scribble.
“Very good.”

“I assume that creates a problem.”

He cleared his throat. “Does the ejected world have a name?”

I scrambled for one. I’d once had a cat named for a character in an old novel. “Yes,” I said. “It’s called Balfour.”

“Balfour.”
He tasted it, ran it around on his lips.
“If people can give it a name, surely somebody would have an idea which way it went. If not, if you’re just going out into the dark to search, you’d be as likely to find it as to find a coin in a sizable patch of woods. At night.”

“Even with the best technology?”

He laughed. There was something of a rumble in it. Had we been audio only I would have thought him much bigger than he was. “
Consider the sensor gear a flashlight. With a narrow beam
.”

“Situation’s that bad, huh?”

“I always try to take an optimistic view.”

There are persons who pass through our lives but briefly. And we are never afterward the same.
— Chile Yarimoto,
Travels,
1421

Alex doesn’t believe anything’s impossible. If you can travel faster than light, he liked to say, everything’s on the table. The corollary is that you don’t go to him and tell him an assignment can’t be managed.

I needed help, so I went back to Shara. She was engrossed in a conversation with — I think — her AI when I walked in the door. She signaled me she needed a minute, asked a couple questions about stellar populations in a region I’d never heard of, got her answers, made notes, and turned my way with a big smile. “Chase,” she said. “How’s it feel to be a celebrity?”

“I’m looking for a way to cash in.”

“I understand they’re trying to get you to come work for Survey.”

“There’s been some talk.”

“Don’t do it. There’s not much money, and I don’t think anybody ever got famous.” She got serious. “What can I do for you?”

“Shara, there was another world in the Tinicum system. A class-K. We suspect whatever scrambled the orbit of Margolia ejected it.”

“And you were wondering if there might be a way to track it down?”

“Yes.”

“Why on earth would you care? You think there might have been a base there?”

“Something like that.”

“Okay,” she said.

“So do you think it might be possible to find it?”

“This all happened, what, nine thousand years ago?”

“That’s correct.”

“Good. That’s relatively recent. But you don’t know the nature of the intruder? Of whatever broke up the system?”

“No. We think it might have been a black hole.”

“Why?”

“Because there aren’t any stars near enough to have done the job.”

She looked skeptical. “Well, actually, it might have been any of a number of things.”

“Whatever. We don’t care what the object was. All we’re interested in is finding the missing world.”

“It might be possible. Tell me about the system again.”

“Okay,” I said. “Right now, it has two gas giants in normal orbits. It also has Margolia, which is running in a seriously exaggerated ellipse, and a dislodged moon.”

“Does the class-K have a name?”

“Balfour.” It was starting to sound good.

“And you’ve got a couple of ancient spacecraft out there, too, right?”

“Yes. And a dock that went adrift at the time of the event. The
Seeker
was apparently trying to jump into hyper when it blew.”

“Okay. As I understand it, the
Seeker
set out with those kids three years before the event.”

“That’s correct.”

“That means it probably won’t be much help. What about the other ship? The Whatzis?”

“The
Bremerhaven
. Its orbit doesn’t place it anywhere near Margolia when the intruder came through.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Maybe it was orbiting Balfour.”

“Any reason to think that? Or is it guesswork?”

“It’s guesswork.”

“What about the dock?”

“It would have been at Margolia when the object hit.”

“And they’re both currently in solar orbit?”

“Yes.”

“Get me the details. Everything you’ve got. The first thing we need to do is establish when it happened.”

“We already know.”

“All right. Good. That might make it possible. Send me the data. I’ll look everything over and get back to you.”

“Thanks, Shara.”

“My pleasure. I’m glad to help. It’ll be a break from my routine. Is there a deadline on this?”

“No,” I said. “It’s waited this long; I assume it can wait a bit longer.”

She laughed. “Get it to me tonight, and I’ll try to have something for you tomorrow.”

“You were right about the time of the event,” she said next evening, as we sat at the Longtree, sipping cocktails. “It happened March 1, 2745, on the terrestrial calendar.”

“That’s only a couple days away from what we figured.”

“We’re talking calendars rather than time itself,” she said. “It’s hard to deal with this sort of thing because of the odd things that happen with time when the objects are hundreds of light-years apart.”

“All right,” I said. “We know
when
it happened. Where do we go from there?”

A singer was doing “Fire and Ice.” It was cold and wet outside. But the Longtree was filled to capacity. A wedding party had taken over one wing, and another large group was celebrating something. Couldn’t tell what. There were occasional bursts of laughter around the room. In the center of the dining area, several couples were dancing.

“Chase,” she said, “we know where the gas giants were at the time of the event.”

“Okay.”

“They were undisturbed by the passage. That probably lets out your black hole. Had the intruder been massive, really massive, they would have been disrupted, too. But in this case, their orbits don’t seem to have been influenced at all.”

“That tells us what?”

“That the intruder was less than a tenth of a solar mass.”

“Okay.” I didn’t see how that could help. But she seemed to know where she was headed.

She finished her cocktail and ordered another round. “Might as well,” she said, “as long as Alex is feeling generous.” Rainbow, of course, was paying for the evening.

“Absolutely. Help yourself.”

“All right. So Margolia’s orbit gets stretched, and its moon goes south. The other terrestrial world, Balfour, is tossed out of the system altogether. That suggests an intruder mass at least a hundred times greater than Margolia.”

“Okay.”

“My best guess,” she said, “is a mass equivalent somewhere between a Jovian and an M-class dwarf star.”

“Shara,” I said, “I know you’re interested for academic reasons. But is any of this going to help us find Balfour?”