He would have liked some rum. But he knew from hard experience that when he got like this, he’d drink too much.
Soon it would be over. Once back on solid ground, he’d retire to the villa his agent had bought for him. It was situated on a promontory, out of the way, off a private road. No visitors. No neighbors. No one left to answer to.
If he’d been smart, he’d have gotten off Pinnacle years ago, before it all came front and center again. But he’d let it go, thinking that since he was no longer involved, people would have forgotten him. Forgotten he was ever there.
Aren’t you the Nightingale who botched the first mission so thoroughly that we never went back?
He had no close friends, but he was not sure why that was. Consequently, there’d never been anyone with whom to share his considerable professional success. And now, in this increasingly sterile environment, he found himself reflecting more intensely on his life, and sensing that if indeed it was a journey he hadn’t gone anywhere.
Now, with the return of Maleiva III to the news, with the increase of public interest in everything that had to do with the doomed world, his situation was proceeding rapidly downhill. He had even considered changing his name when he got home. But there were serious complications to doing that. The paperwork involved was daunting. No, it should be sufficient just to keep himself out of the directories. He’d already made one mistake, telling these people where he was going, that he was headed for Scotland.
He’d established a code. Any money due him, any formal transactions, anyone trying to reach him for any reason, would get filed in the code box. Then he could respond, or not, as he pleased. No one would know where he was. And if he was careful, no one near Banff, where he proposed to settle, would know who he was.
Aren’t you the Nightingale who fainted?
On that terrible day, the creatures had ripped into him. The e-suit had been of limited protection, had not stopped the attack, but had prevented the little sons of bitches from injecting their poison. Nevertheless, the beaks had gone into soft flesh. His neck, though physically all right, had never really healed. Some psychic scar that wouldn’t go away and the doctors couldn’t cure.
Anyone would have done the same thing he did.
Well, maybe not anyone. But he hadn’t been afraid, any more than anybody else. And he hadn’t run, hadn’t abandoned anyone. He had tried.
The luxury liner Evening Star was carrying fifteen hundred passengers who expected to party through the collision. One of these was the internationally famous Gregory MacAllister, editor, commentator, observer of the human condition. MacAllister prided himself on maintaining a sense of proper humility. On hunting expeditions, he carried his own weapons. He always made it a point with his associates to behave as if they were equals. He was unfailingly polite to the waves of ordinary persons with whom he came in contact, the waiters and physicians and ship captains of the world. Occasionally he made joking references to peasants, but everyone understood they were indeed only jokes.
He was a major political force, and the discoverer of a dozen of the brightest lights on the literary scene. He was ex-officio director of the Chicago Society, a political and literary think tank. He was also on the board of governors of the Baltimore Lexicography Institute, and the editor emeritus of Premier. He was an influential member of several philanthropic societies, although he persisted in describing poor people publicly as incompetent and lazy. He had played a major role in hiring the lawyers who’d taken the Brantley School Board to court in the Genesis Trial. He liked to think of himself as the world’s only practicing destroyer of mountebanks, frauds, college professors, and bishops.
He had reluctantly agreed to travel on the Evening Star. Not that he wasn’t excited by the prospect of watching entire worlds collide, but that the whole activity seemed somehow a trifle proletarian. It was the sort of thing done by people who lacked a set of substantive values. Like going to a public beach. Or a football game.
But he had consented, admitting finally to his own curiosity and to an opportunity to be able to say that he’d been there when this particular piece of history was made. Furthermore, it allowed him to demonstrate his solidarity with ordinary folks. Even if these ordinary folks tended to own large tracts of real estate along the Cape and inshore on the Hudson.
After all, a little planet-smashing might be fun, and might even provide material for a few rambles about the transience of life and the uncertainty of material advantage. Not that he was against material advantage. The only people he knew of who would have leveled material advantage so that no one had any were of course those who had none to start with.
His decision to attend had also been influenced by the passenger list, which included many of the political and industrial leaders of the period.
Although he would never have admitted it, MacAllister was impressed by the amenities of the giant ship. His stateroom was more cramped than he would have preferred. But that was to be expected. It was nonetheless comfortable, and the decor suggested a restrained good taste rather than the polished superficial luxury one usually found aboard the big superluminal liners.
He enjoyed wandering through the maze of dining rooms, bars, and lounges. Several areas had been converted into virtual verandas, from which when the time came, the passengers would be able to watch the Event.
Although MacAllister had originally planned to spend much of his time working, he took instead to holding court in a bistro called The Navigator on the starboard side, upper deck. It overflowed each evening with notables and admirers, usually second-level political types, their advisers, journalists, a few CEOs, and some writers. All were anxious to be associated with him, to be seen as his friends. On his first night out, he’d been invited to dine at the captain’s table. Not quite settled in yet, he’d declined.
If MacAllister had enemies who would not have been sad to see him left somewhere in the Maleiva system, preferably on the doomed planet, he knew that the world at large perceived him as a knight-errant, righting wrongs, puncturing buffooneries, and generally enlisted in the front rank of those who were striving to keep the planet safe for common sense.
He enjoyed a reputation as a brilliant analyst and, even more important, as a model of integrity. He sided neither with progressive nor conservative. He could not be bought. And he could not be fooled.
Women-offered themselves to him. He took some, although he acted with discretion, assuring himself first that there was no possibility of an enraged husband turning up. He harbored a great affection for the opposite sex, although he understood, during an age of weak males, that women belonged in kitchens and in beds. That they were happiest in those locations, and that once everyone got around to recognizing that simple truth, life would become better for all.
Midway through the voyage, he heard the report that artificial structures had been found on Deepsix and commented on it in the journal he’d kept all his life:
We’ve known about Maleiva III and the coming collision for twenty-odd years, he wrote, and suddenly, with a few weeks left, they discover that unfortunate world has had a history. Now, of course, there will be some advanced finger-pointing to determine which rascals are responsible for having overlooked the detail. It will, of course, turn out to be the fault of the pilot of the Taliaferro, who is safely dead. And they’ll find that the failure to check the satellite data at home can be laid to a grade-three clerk. It’ll be an entertaining show to watch.
There is now no time to inspect this culture, which is about to be lost. An entire species will be wiped out, and there will be no one alive who knows anything about them other than that several meters of stone once stuck out of a snowbank.
Maybe in the end it’s all any of us can expect.
ARCHIVE
TO:
NCA HAROLD WILDSIDE
FROM:
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
SUBJECT:
DEEPSIX PROJECT
HUTCHINS, BE ADVISED PRESENCE OF PR
EDATORS ON DEEPSIX. ORIGINAL PROJECT RECORDS SUGGESTS EXTREME CAUTION. I AM INFORMED THAT THE REIGNING EXPERT ON THE SUBJECT, RANDALL NIGHTINGALE, IS ON BOARD YOUR SHIP. TAKE HIM WITH YOU WHEN YOU GO DOWN.
GOMEZ
TO:
NCA WENDY JAY
FROM:
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
SUBJECT:
ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES
ATTN: GUNTHER BEEKMAN. WE HAVE DIVERTED WILDSIDE TO ESTABLISH ARCHEOLOGICAL INSPECTION TEAM ON DEEPSIX PRISCILLA HUTCHINS WILL LEAD EFFORT. REQUEST YOU AND CAPT. CLAIRVEAU RENDER EVERY ASSISTANCE.
GOMEZ
IV
At the critical moment of a critical mission, when his people most needed him, Randall Nightingale fainted dead away. He was rescued by Sabina Coldfield, and dragged to safety by that estimable woman at the cost of her own life. Everyone now seems shocked that the mission failed, and that no further attempt will be made to examine the mosquitoes and marsh grass of Maleiva III. They say it costs too much, but they’re talking about money. It does cost too much. It costs people like Coldfield, who was worth a dozen Nightingales.
—GREGORY MACALLISTER, “Straight and Narrow,”
Reminiscences
Marcel no longer believed the inhabitants of Deepsix were long dead. Or maybe dead at all.
“I think you might be right,” said Kellie. She buried her chin in her palm and stared at the screen. They were examining visuals taken earlier in the day.
When this mission was completed, Marcel would certify Kellie Collier as fully qualified for her own command. She was only twenty-eight, young for that kind of responsibility, but she was all business, and he saw no point requiring her to sit second seat anymore. Especially with star travel beginning to boom. There were a multitude of superluminals out there begging for command officers, commercial carriers and private yachts and executive and corporate vessels. Not to mention the recent expansion of the Patrol, which had been fueled by the losses last year of the Marigold and the Rancocas, with their crews. The former had simply disintegrated as it prepared to jump into hyperspace; its crew had made it into the lifepods but had exhausted their air supply while waiting for a dilatory Patrol to respond. The Rancocas had suffered a power failure and gone adrift. Communications had failed, and no one had noticed until it was too late.
As people moved out to the newly terraformed worlds, where land was unlimited, the public was demanding a commitment to safety. Consequently the Patrol had entered an era of expansion. It was hard to know how far a young hotshot like Collier might go.
Kellie was studying the foothills of one of the mountain ranges in central Transitoria. “I don’t think there’s any question about it,” she said. “It’s a road. Or it used to be.”
Marcel thought she was seeing what she wanted to see. “It’s overgrown.” He sat down beside her. “Hard to tell. It might be an old riverbed.”
“Look over here. It goes uphill. That was never a watercourse.” She squinted at the screen. “But I’d say it’s been a long time since anyone used it.”
They had, during the five days that had passed since the first discovery, seen widely scattered evidence of habitation. More than that, they’d seen the remnants of cities on three continents. The cities were long dead, buried, crushed beneath glaciers. It also appeared they had been preindustrial. Further elucidation would have to wait until Hutchins arrived and took her team down for a close look. But there were no structures that could be said to dominate the surrounding landscape, and the snow wasn’t so deep as to bury major engineering work. There were no bridges, no dams, no skyscrapers, no signs of construction on a large scale. Just here and there a fragment in the snow. A rooftop, a post, a pier.
On an island they’d named Freezover, there was a ring of stones. A cart waited in the middle of a barren field near Bad News Bay, near the place at which Nightingale’s mission had come to grief; and an object that might have been a plow had been sighted at Cape Chagrin in the Tempis.
But the road—
It was approximately thirty kilometers long, and they could trace it from its beginnings in a river valley, cross-country along the boundary of a small lake, onto a rise at the foot of one of the mountains. (Kellie was right: It could not be a watercourse.) It disappeared briefly into a tangle of forest before emerging again near the ocean.
The road ran past the base of one of the taller mountains. It towered almost seven thousand meters over the forest. Its northern side was sheared away, creating an unbroken drop from the cloud-shrouded summit down onto a gradual slope. When the sunlight hit the rock wall at dawn, they detected a cobalt tint, and so they called it Mt. Blue.
“The sightseer route,” said Marcel.
Kellie shrugged. “Maybe. I wish we could go down and look.”
“The Wildside should be able to settle things when it gets here.”
She folded her arms and let him see she was about to ask for something. Instead: “It’s lucky there was an archeologist within range.”
“Hutch?” Marcel allowed himself a smile. “She’s no archeologist. Actually, she’s in our line of work.”
“A pilot?”
“Yeah. I guess she’s all they had. But she’s been down on some sites.”
Kellie nodded, stood, and looked at him carefully. “You think she’d let me go down with her?”
“If you asked, she probably would. Probably be glad to get the help. The real question is whether I’d allow it.”
Kellie was attractive, tall, with dark bedroom eyes, sleek black skin, and soft shoulder-length hair. Marcel knew that she found no difficulty having her way with men, and that she tried not to use her charms on him. Bad form, she’d told him once. But it came as natural to her as breathing. Her eyelids fluttered and she contrived to gaze up at him even though he was still seated. “Marcel, they said we should render all assistance.”
“I don’t think they meant personnel.”
She held him in her gaze. “I’d like very much to go. You don’t really need me here.”
Marcel considered it. “The lander’s probably going to fill up with the science people,” he said. “We’ll have to give them priority.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “That’s not unreasonable. But if there’s room…”
Marcel was uneasy. He knew Hutch, not well, but enough to trust her. The experts weren’t sure when Deepsix would start coming apart. And there was dangerous animal life down there. Still, Kellie was a grown woman, and he could see no reason to refuse the request. “I’ll check with her, see what she says.”
Beekman was lost in thought when Marcel took a seat beside him. He was frowning, his gaze turned inward, his brow wrinkled. Then he jerked into awareness and looked unsteadily at the captain. “Marcel,” he said, “I have a question for you.”
“All right.” They were in project control.
“If there’s really something, somebody, down there capable of building a house or laying a road, should we be thinking about a rescue operation?”
Marcel had been thinking about little else, but he could see no practical way to approach the problem. How did one rescue aliens? “Wildside only has one lander,” he said. “That’s it. How many do you think we could bring off? Where would we put them? How do you think they’d react to a bunch of cowboys rolling in and trying to round them up?”
“But if there are intelligent creatures down there, it seems as if we’d have a moral obligation to try to save a few. Don’t you think?”
“How much experience have you with ET life-forms?” asked Marcel.
Beekman shook his head. “Not much, really.”
“They might be people-eaters.”
“That’s unlikely. We’re talking about something that makes roads.” Beekman looked seriously uncomfortable. “I know the lander’s small, and we’ve got only one. But we could take a few. It’s what the Academy would want us to do.” He was wearing a gray vest, which he pulled tightly about him as if he were cold. “How many does it hold? Th
e Wildside lander?”
Marcel asked Bill. The numbers popped up on the screen. Eleven plus a pilot. “Maybe we should wait until we’re confronted by the problem,” he said.
Beekman nodded slowly. “I suppose.”
“Taking off a handful,” pursued Marcel, “might not be a kind act. We’d be rescuing them so they could watch their world die.” He shook his head. “It would be dangerous. We’d have no way of knowing what they would do when we walked up and said hello. We wouldn’t be able to communicate. And then there’s the gene pool.”
Beekman heaved himself out of his chair and went over to the wallscreen, which looked down on towering cumulus and cold blue seas. “We could probably synthesize the genes. Give them a chance to continue.” He stared at Deepsix.
“It’s not our call,” said Marcel. “The Academy knows what we’ve found. If they want us to do a rescue operation, let them tell us so.”
During the next couple of days, there were other discoveries: a collapsed structure that might have been a storage building along a river in Northern Tempus, a wooden palisade hidden in a forest, an abandoned boat frozen in the ice at Port Umbrage. The boat, lying on its side, was about twelve meters long, and it had masts. But its proportions suggested the mariners had been considerably smaller than humans. “Looks like a galley,” said Mira. “You can even see a cabin in the rear.”
Chiang Harmon agreed. “It would be small for one of us, but it’s there. How old’s the ice?”
“Probably been there since the beginning.” She was referring to the system’s encounter with the Quiveras Cloud. Port Umbrage, they believed, had been frozen solid three thousand years ago, and had never thawed. It was in the far northern latitudes on the east coast of Gloriamundi.
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