“No,” he said. “That’s why I thought it might be directed at you and Alex.”
“There’s no reason,” I said, “why anybody should want to come after us. But I suppose it’s possible.”
“Well, I plan to be careful for a while. I’d suggest you guys be heads-up, too. Maybe you should back off this Baylee thing for a while. That might be the problem. In any case, I’d hate to see anything happen to you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”
He was warm and gentle, and, unlike most guys, he wanted to talk about things I cared about, rather than about himself. He would have been worth hanging on to.
The evening ended on a note of lost opportunity. “If you get back here, Chase, or you have some free time before you go home to Rimway, let me know, okay? I’d love to do this again.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance, Khaled. But if it happens, I’ll let you know.”
“Good enough.”
We kissed, at first tentatively, then I took things into my own hands.
* * *
In the morning, we wandered down to the hotel restaurant and Alex asked me if I was ready to head out. I had mixed feelings, but a part of me was hoping we’d get an extra day in the area. “Why don’t we relax a bit?” I said. “Take some time for ourselves?”
“Oh.” He grinned. “It went that well, huh?”
“He’s a good guy. Saved our lives.”
“Okay. You can stay in the area if you want. I’m headed for Atlanta.”
“What’s in Atlanta?”
“The Albertson Data Museum.”
“Another museum?”
“They try to recover information that was lost when the first internet collapsed. That’s all. This has nothing to do with Baylee. I want to see if they have anything we can take back with us. For our clients.”
“Okay.” I hesitated. “I’ll go.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“Good. I think it’s safer.”
An autotray rolled up to the table, and our breakfasts were placed in front of us. “Anything else you would like?” asked the bot.
Alex waited until I’d indicated I was fine. “No, thanks,” he said. “This is good.” We’d just started eating when Alex frowned and touched his link. He listened for a moment and formed the words Madeleine O’Rourke with his lips. I needed a moment to place the name. She was the reporter from The Plains Drifter. “Yes, Madeleine,” he said, “what can I do for you?” He increased the volume so I could hear.
“Alex, I just heard about the attack. You and Chase are okay, right?”
“Yes, we’re fine. Just got dumped in the water, that’s all.”
“I’m so glad. Who was it anyhow? Any idea?”
“None.”
“Wow. Alex, is this the first time it’s happened?”
“Yes, Madeleine, it is.”
“You know any reason why someone would be trying to kill you?”
“To be honest, I assumed someone was angry with Eisa Friendly Charters. I don’t think it was aimed at us. No reason it would be.”
“Be careful about assumptions.”
“I try to be.”
“Good.”
Pause. Then: “How’d you find us?”
“Oh, come on, Alex. You’re a big name. And now you’ve been involved in this incident. You think you’re not visible?”
* * *
I went back to my eggs while Alex touched his link. “Connect me with The Plains Drifter. It’s in Centralia.”
“Why are you calling her back?” I asked.
“Hang on a second, Chase.”
Then a man’s voice: “Good morning. Plains Drifter. This is Cam Everett.”
“Mr. Everett, I was trying to reach Madeleine O’Rourke.”
“Who?”
“Madeleine O’Rourke. She’s one of your reporters?”
“Umm, no. I never heard of her.”
“Oh. Sorry, Mr. Everett. Must have been a communication breakdown on my end. Thanks.” He disconnected and looked at me. “I think we might have just discovered who was in the skimmer.”
TWENTY-SIX
History is the witness of time, the torch of truth, the memory of who we are. It is the ultimate teacher about life, the messenger from the past.
—Cicero, 80 B.C.E.
Alex thinks the worst disaster in the history of the human race occurred when the internet shut down, apparently without warning, early in the Fourth Millennium. “The breadth of the loss,” he said, as we went in through the museum’s front doors, “is best illustrated by the fact that we don’t even know what disappeared.”
The vast majority of books, histories, classic novels, philosophical texts, were simply gone. Most of the world’s poetry vanished. Glimpses of Shelley and Housman and Schneider survived only in ancient love letters or diaries. Their work doesn’t exist anymore. Just like almost every novel written before the thirty-eighth century. We hear references to the humor of James Thurber, but we have nothing to demonstrate it. Unfortunately, there was no equivalent this time of the monasteries that salvaged so much during the first dark age. Within a few generations of the electronic collapse, a few people knew Pericles had been important, but hardly anyone knew why. And Mark Twain was only a name.
There’d been internets on the colonial worlds, but unfortunately they were all in their early years and the titles they carried tended to be largely limited to local novels.
The Albertson Museum, apparently, had locked down its reputation when it recovered a copy of The Merry Wives of Windsor. That had given us a total of six Shakespearean plays. A bound copy of the six, titled The Complete Plays, was for sale in the gift shop. I couldn’t resist.
That got Alex’s approval. “It’s interesting,” he said, “we still use the term bookshelves, but we don’t put many books on them.”
Books aren’t generally available. You have to go to a specialty shop or a museum to find bound books. We’d kept the Churchill volume that we had come across several years ago on Salud Afar. It was Their Finest Hour, the second volume of his history of the Second World War. The rest, of course, is lost. At first, Alex had talked about selling it, but it wasn’t hard to persuade him to find a spot for it in my office, where it remains.
The museum had also posted a list of recently uncovered historical information. Most of it came from internets around the Confederacy. They aren’t connected, of course, so information thought lost in some places occasionally turns up in others. Anyhow, that was the day I discovered why the term waterloo meant bad news. And how it happened that rubicon had something to do with a point of no return. And I’d always known what people meant when they called someone a Benedict Arnold. That day I learned why.
We wandered through the displays, looking at household items dating back thousands of years, athletic equipment for games I’d never heard of, and kitchen gear from the days when people did their own cooking.
They had a theater where you could watch one of the movies from Hollywood’s early years. Hollywood was where they manufactured most of the films when the technology was just getting started. Only seven have survived from that era. All are shown in the theater, and are also available in the gift shop. In case anyone’s curious, they are High Noon, South Pacific, Beaches, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Casablanca, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Alex spent several minutes gazing at the display. “You going to get any of them?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a fan of ancient movies. But Casablanca looks interesting.”
“Why don’t we get the entire package?”
I was surprised to discover that two songs I’d thought were more or less current, that I’d grown up with, h
ad come from the films. “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” was from South Pacific. And “Wind Beneath My Wings” came from Beaches. So we got the package.
They had some hardcover books for collectors. A few histories. Several copies of the Bible. Twenty or so novels I’d never heard of. Several commentaries on religion. A few histories, including a book titled It Never Happened, by Russell Brenkov. Brenkov was a Dark Age historian. His name had been mentioned during my college years, but I’d never read him.
There are also fictional characters who were once famous but who have been forgotten. Tarzan swung through jungles in a series of books that, in their time, are supposed to have outsold everything except the Bible. The search to identify him—it’s assumed he is a male—is still on.
Dracula, as far as we know, appeared in only one novel, but his name survives. He was apparently a physician. His name is associated with blood extraction. If that seems grim, it helps to recall that he practiced in an era during which invasive surgery was common.
Sherlock Holmes was lost for six thousand years before being rediscovered thirty years ago by people working with the Goldman Institute. Now, at least on Rimway, he’s enormously popular. His name never really disappeared from the language. It remains synonymous with deductive skills.
Superman and Batman got their start, we think, during the twenty-fourth century. Except for a brief period during the Dark Age, they’ve never gone away.
* * *
We joined a guided tour. The guide was explaining why so much had been lost, and how active efforts at recovery have been under way for centuries and would probably continue indefinitely. “When the early colonists first went out,” she said, “they took a lot of things with them, especially books and movies. A lot of it is still out there, we think, but we have never really organized things to bring it all together.”
A teenager wanted to know why they hadn’t combined the internet data yet. “After all,” he said, “it’s been thousands of years.”
The tour guide laughed. “I’d guess it’s because they keep growing. Keep acquiring information. I’m not sure what kind of effort it would take to figure out what’s missing from our system. Part of the problem with losing material is that very often you also lose the memory that it existed. In time, you no longer have a record of what’s gone. Digging through other data systems sounds like a good idea, but we don’t always know what we’re looking for. It tends to happen by accident. We don’t know, for example, how many Shakespearean plays there were. When we discovered The Merry Wives of Windsor, nobody here had ever even heard of it. It was a complete shock. They had it at the City on the Crag, but nobody here had come across it.”
“Are some of his other plays out there?”
“Possibly,” said the tour guide. “We hope. We have people visiting every world in the Confederacy, looking for that and whatever else might be available.”
* * *
“At one time,” said Alex, “archeology was just pick-and-shovel operations. Today it’s also a series of electronic searches.” We were standing in front of the statue of a man in the main entrance hall. It had been recovered from Lake Washington, but its identity was lost.
The museum has pictures of athletes in various types of uniforms, some wearing helmets, some outsized gloves, some carrying long sticks. People still play soccer, and we know a little about the other sports, but they’re long gone. Nobody’s even sure when they died out. He stared up at the statue. A phrase was engraved across the ceiling which is associated with him: I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
I’m not sure who he was, but I suspect I’d have liked the guy.
* * *
Baylee and Southwick were included with a list of contributors framed in the entry. “I’m not sure what we’d do without people like them,” I said. “Gabe’s name should be up there, too.”
I regretted the comment immediately. It was halfway out before I thought to shut it down, and by then it was too late. “You have to contribute to this museum to get that kind of recognition,” said Alex. “His name is up in a few places.” He was close to saying something more, but he cut it off. “Yeah,” he said finally, “he’s in good company.”
Time to change the subject: “How about we get something to eat?”
“Okay. That sounds like a good idea.”
We left the museum and crossed the street to the Barrista Grill. Soft music drifted through the dining area.
“So what’s next?” I asked, as we took a table near a window. The sky was filled with clouds.
“I don’t know. If it weren’t for the attack on the boat, I’d be about ready to give it up and head home. But somebody wants us to stop. Why?”
“I have no idea.”
“Madeleine O’Rourke changed the game.” The candles blinked on, and the table described a couple of specials and asked what we’d like. We ordered a bottle of wine with our meal and sat back to relax. Alex was lost in thought. I stared out the window, watching as rain began to fall. Two people had paused outside trying to make up their minds about coming in. The rain settled the matter for them.
The wine arrived.
Finally, I asked him what he was thinking about.
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he said.
“Did you want to go watch it tonight?”
“That’s not what I mean. It struck me that when we were trying to find Larissa, we limited the search too much.” He picked up the bottle and popped the cork.
“You mean we should have looked off-world?”
“Very good.”
“There’s no colony with that name.”
“No, there isn’t. But there are six places in the Confederacy. Two states, two islands, and a mountain. We can eliminate them because they’re all on worlds that we hadn’t reached during the Dark Age.”
“You only named five.”
“The sixth one is a moon. Orbiting Neptune.”
“In this system?”
“Yes.”
“Beautiful.”
Alex smiled. “Let’s hope.” He took a deep breath and filled the glasses. “By the way, the place has a site that would have been perfect for hiding the artifacts.”
“Really?” I said. “What’s that?”
“There was a research station built out there during the twenty-fifth century. It was abandoned after about eighty years. Or four centuries. Depends whose history you read. In any case, it would have been a tempting place to store the museum artifacts.”
“Sounds more promising than the Aegean.”
“Yes. We assumed the reference was to the Greek area because Zorbas was born near there. But that might have gotten us thinking small.”
I picked up my glass. “Sounds good to me.”
“Maybe we have it this time.” He lifted his and took a deep breath. “Let’s hear it for the Neptunians.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The human experience, for us, is a period stretching back over a few thousand years, starting with the Sumerians and extending to the first manned Mars flight. And already we have lost parts of it. What happened to the Minoan civilization? Or the one that prospered thousands of years ago in the Indus Valley? Who created the Sphinx? How did an ancient people move the Stonehenge rocks? Or construct mathematically correct pyramids? Did the Ark of the Covenant ever really exist? One has to wonder how much will have gone missing when another few thousand years have passed.
—Joseph McMurtrie, Looking Forward, 2312 C.E.
The jump out to Neptune took almost no time at all, but we surfaced almost a million kilometers from Larissa. “Make yourself comfortable for a couple of days,” I told Alex. And he did, settling in with a twenty-second-century book he’d picked up that insisted there was nothing left for science to do. I’ve mentio
ned that Alex, like his customers, enjoys the feel of objects that have passed through hands in ancient times. But he doesn’t stop there. He also has a passion for ideas from other eras, concepts, points of view. I don’t know anyone else who reads Plato for sheer pleasure.
If you sit by a couch that had once served Owen Watkin, he’d say, or Albert Einstein, you can almost feel their presence. He never tried to explain the psychology of it. It was simply, for him and for his clients, a reality. It was the reason that he never felt guilty about selling artifacts to his customers rather than donating them to museums. Put it in a museum, he’d say, and people wander past and stare at it. But that’s nothing other than a superficial reaction. The people who come to Rainbow Enterprises want something more. They hope to share their time, their lives, with an historical figure they’ve come to know. To reach across the centuries, the millennia, and touch Serena Black. And I know how that sounds. There’s no way I can explain that to anyone who doesn’t already understand why some people love antiques. But Alex concedes that sitting in light emanating from a lamp once owned by a celebrity doesn’t really allow you to hold a conversation with that person. To do that, you need an avatar. Or, for someone from an earlier era, a book. I should mention, by the way, that it’s especially difficult to explain the passion when I don’t really share it. Alex tells me that he feels sorry for me. And when I tell him maybe in time I’ll acquire the taste, he says no. He tells me the boat has left.
* * *
I’d picked up a jigsaw puzzle at the space station. A real one where you actually need a table. It was two thousand pieces, and depicted the Hadley Telescope against an array of stars and a service vehicle. I set it up in the passenger cabin. Alex watched as I started on it, said nothing for a few minutes, and finally asked whether I could finish it before we had to change course or velocity, which would scatter the pieces. “That’s what makes it interesting,” I said.
He laughed. But it didn’t take long before he joined me.
We worked on it for much of the first day. That evening, he suggested we watch Casablanca. I wasn’t exactly reluctant, but I’d been looking forward to seeing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
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