Coming Home

by Jack McDevitt

  I also picked up a novel from the twenty-first century about a pilot living in the early years of interstellar travel. That one survives, and Wendell Chali goes missing. It’s frustrating. Still, I identified with the pilot. Her name was Hutchins, and I remember thinking that I’d have enjoyed talking with her.

  * * *

  We needed two more calls before we finally caught up with Heli. She was seated in a lobby at a hotel. Behind her, through a room-length portal, we could see nothing but ocean. “Yes, Lawrence,” she said, thinking she was speaking to Southwick. “I wasn’t aware you were coming back. Where are you now?”

  “In Hawaii. I’m on business. I’ll only be here a couple of days.”

  “Okay. What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to alert you that Benedict is still at it. In fact, he came back here a few days ago. Have you heard from him?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Be careful. Stay out of his way, okay?”

  “Don’t worry, Lawrence. That nitwit won’t get anything from me. He doesn’t even know my name.”

  “All right. Just keep down. I’ll let you know when he goes back to Rimway. One other thing, I think he knows about the asteroid. The, um, what was it, KL-something?”

  “KL-4561,” she said.

  “Yeah. Right. My memory doesn’t work too well anymore. Anyhow, if you see anything that suggests he’s headed out that way, let me know. The guy’s a publicity hound, so if he really does have something, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t make the news with it. Okay?”

  “All right, Lawrence.”

  “By the way, I won’t be answering my personal link. I’m at the Majestic Hotel. If you need to reach me, just leave a message, and I’ll get back to you.”

  He disconnected and sat back in his chair with a look of triumph. “Finally, Chase.”

  “How’d you know about the KL?”

  “All the large asteroids in the belt have a KL designator.”

  “Why’d it have to be in the belt?”

  “Most of the asteroids are. I was playing the odds.”

  “Okay. Then why did it have to be a large asteroid?”

  “It had a name.”

  “Not bad,” I said, “for a nitwit. By the way, what happens if she calls back and discovers Southwick isn’t here?”

  “I’ve already taken care of that at the desk. They think Southwick is my pen name.”

  We did a search for KL-4561. There were a couple of pictures, and some information on its dimensions. It was thirty-seven kilometers in diameter, and it was in the outer main belt, orbiting the sun in slightly more than eight years. He brought up the Flex cover and compared it. “Well,” he said, “one asteroid looks pretty much like another.”

  * * *

  I’d just come out of the shower when Khaled called. So I kept it on audio. “Hi, Chase,” he said. “I was surprised to find out you were here. You didn’t call me.” He sounded genuinely disappointed.

  I was still not supposed to be talking to him. Or letting him know what we’d learned. “We haven’t had much free time, Khaled,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “And we’re not going to be staying long.”

  “Oh.” He sounded genuinely upset. What the hell was it with this guy? “What are you doing in Hawaii?”

  “We’re here for the Mililandi Fest. We’d seen that a lot of artifacts were going to be on display. So we came hoping to find some we could pick up. Alex does stuff like this all the time.”

  “You sound kind of funny. Is everything okay?”

  I wanted to scream. You sold us out, Khaled. Dumped us in the ocean. Played us for idiots. And you want to know if everything’s okay? “Sure,” I said. “Everything’s fine. I’m just a little tired, I guess. We’ve been on the run. How did you know we were here?”

  “I saw something about Alex on HV. I assumed if he was here, you were, too.”

  “Okay. Yes, um, listen, I have to go. We’re trying to make a flight.”

  “When are you going back, Chase? Any chance we can get together before you leave?”

  “I don’t think so, Khaled. I don’t have any free time. Listen, I’ve gotta go. Alex is calling me.”

  “All right. I wouldn’t want to crowd you. I know how busy you must be.”

  “So long, Khaled.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  The vast majority of us are far more capable than we realize. We grow up with parents, teachers, bosses all telling us what we can’t do. Don’t touch it; you’ll break it. They mean well, but they leave us with a sense of our own incapacity. When the day comes, if it comes, that you begin to believe in yourself, the world will be yours.

  —Mara Delona, Travels with the Bishop, 1404

  We picked up a chip in the operational services office that would allow us to locate KL-4561, or any of the other listed asteroids. Several hours later, we were on our way back up to Galileo. Alex was visibly excited. “You have any idea what we’re going to find?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “Best I can come up with is that Baylee inadvertently led some pirates there, and they took off with everything. They left him with the transmitter as part of a deal that he wouldn’t say anything. And they agreed not to kill him.”

  “Alex, that doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, there are no pirates.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why—?”

  “You asked for a theory. At the moment, it’s all I have.”

  * * *

  The Belle-Marie was waiting when we arrived. I’d have preferred to spend a few more days in Hawaii and just enjoy the ocean and sunlight. But Alex was anxious to resolve this business, and the luaus would fall pretty flat with Baylee’s transmitter hanging over our heads.

  We picked up some food supplies and climbed on board. Larissa was on the other side of the sun, so we had a long ride ahead of us. Alex went back into the passenger cabin while I turned the ship over to Belle and waited for authorization to leave. I couldn’t help being impressed by the amount of traffic handled by Galileo. It had close to four times the docking area that Skydeck possesses, and it wasn’t really enough. Plans were under way to extend its facilities. The home world still handled more commerce than any other world in the Confederacy. It did not have the largest population. In fact, four other worlds surpassed it. But it claimed with some justification to be home to the major advances in the arts and sciences. Of course, scientific advancement had for a long time consisted of little more than taking existing technologies and making them more effective. There just wasn’t much left to uncover.

  “Belle-Marie, this is operations. You are clear to go.”

  “Acknowledge, ops.” I warned Alex. Belle released us from the dock, and we eased out toward the exit. It looked as if sun, Moon, and Earth were lined up. I wondered if they were getting an eclipse groundside.

  * * *

  We made our jump and surfaced a short time later. “How’d we do?” Alex asked.

  “Not bad,” I said. “We’ll need about two days to get to it. We can make it a little quicker if you want, but it’ll be an uncomfortable ride. And suck up a lot of fuel.”

  “No reason to hurry, Chase,” he said. “Whatever’s there has been sitting around for more than eleven years. A few hours one way or the other won’t make much difference.”

  We relaxed and read the books we’d picked up at the Maui Museum, watched some comedy shows from the library, and kept up a decent workout schedule. Sometimes we just sat and talked. The main topic of conversation was inevitably the Capella, and my reaction to seeing Gabe again. We didn’t speculate much on what we expected to find on the asteroid, which led me to suspect that, despite his denials, Alex had a theory. But he didn’t bring it up, so I let it go.

  I’d thought a lot about it, of course. The only explanation that seemed feasible to me was that
the whole Larissa thing was a missed communication somewhere. That Baylee had never found the Prairie House artifacts. That when he’d come across the transmitter, it had been by itself somewhere. Probably, someone had found the artifacts thousands of years ago, had sold everything off, and it simply never made the history books. Or, like so much else, everything had simply gotten lost. If Alex had asked me what I expected to find when we arrived at KL-4561, I’d have told him there’d probably be nothing.

  * * *

  Belle woke me on the morning of the third day. “We’re close,” she said. “KL-4561 is about two hours away.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Belle. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Do you want me to wake Alex?”

  “No,” I said. “No need to.”

  I got up, showered, dressed, and headed for the bridge. Alex was moving around in his cabin. Asteroid belts are not rare, but this would be my first visit to one. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but it wasn’t the progressively brighter glow in an otherwise-empty sky. “It’s the Gegenschein,” said Belle.

  “What’s a gegenschein?” I asked.

  “It’s sunlight backscattered from the dust in the ecliptic.”

  “Okay. Where are the asteroids?”

  “They’re hard to make out. They don’t reflect well.”

  “Just the dust,” I said.

  “The asteroids are out there.” She adjusted one of the scopes, and a dark, lumpy rock appeared on the navigation screen. “There’s one now. It’s at a range of about four thousand kilometers. Too small to see with the naked eye, of course.”

  “How big is it?”

  “Can’t be certain at this range, but not more than forty meters across.”

  “All right. You’re keeping a watch in all directions, right? We don’t want any collisions.”

  “Yes, Chase.” She was taking a tolerant tone. “But you needn’t be concerned. We could roll through it with the scanners and scopes turned off, and the chances of our hitting anything would be minimal.”

  We’d arranged our arrival so that as we entered the belt, we’d be moving not only to penetrate it, but also in the same direction as the orbiting asteroids. That, of course, reduced the chance of a collision. But it did look empty out there.

  Eventually, Alex showed up. “See anything?”

  “Just a couple of rocks,” I said.

  “It doesn’t look like what I expected.”

  “I thought so, too. Belle tells me we could go through it blindfolded and be pretty safe.”

  “Really? You told her that, Belle?”

  “Not precisely in those words.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Have we locked onto Larissa yet?”

  “Belle?” I asked.

  “Not yet. But we should see it anytime now.”

  We went back into the passenger cabin and had breakfast. I’d gotten into the habit over the past few years of watching the morning news shows. I missed them when we were on the road. Alex had suggested I record a few before leaving Rimway, so I could watch them during the flight.

  “They’d be old news,” I’d told him.

  “They’re always old news,” he’d said. “There are no good journalists anymore.” Alex didn’t like journalists, or at least he didn’t like talk-show hosts because they’d made a living for years inviting people onto their shows to criticize him.

  Alex had always pretended to ignore the tomb-robber comments, but I could see that sometimes they stung. I suspect there was an echo in there somewhere from Gabe’s efforts to win him away from the career he had chosen. Gabe, he’d explained, had never let his anger show, but his disappointment had come through. And it lingered. By the time Gabe got back, in 1440, I suspected Alex would have found a way to construct a rapprochement. He’d discovered that life without his uncle was not fulfilling. He would have denied that he craved Gabe’s blessing, but it was hard to miss.

  My mom hadn’t cared much for Alex, and she’d been uneasy when I went to work for him. She’d have tried to talk me out of it except that she was too smart for that. She understood there would have been no better way to lock me into the country house than to show her disapproval. So she’d concealed it as best she could, and I saw it only on those rare occasions when the subject surfaced because of some news coverage, or my misbegotten attempts to explain how he was performing a public service. She had to work hard not to roll her eyes. There’d been only one occasion I could remember that she’d actually said something directly, and that was after the near disaster on Salud Afar. I can’t quote her, but she commented that people would always remember him as a hero, and she couldn’t deny that it was fortunate he’d been there on that occasion, but that it didn’t change the fact that he saw the world in terms of cash flow. He pretended to love historical objects, she’d said, but that passion was always tied to their sales value.

  I knew Alex better than she did. He had no objection to making money from artifacts. What lay open to the world, in his view, belonged to the world. If he could recover it, he saw no moral imperative that required him to turn it over to a museum. He supplied artifacts to collectors, to people who appreciated their value. To people like Linda Talbott, who could plan a major celebration around a chair.

  I’ve seen Alex’s clients take more pleasure out of an artifact than I’ve ever seen anyone display walking through a museum. And okay, I know how that sounds. But that was running through my mind on that flight, when we confronted the very real possibility that we were about to uncover a find of historic proportions. Consequently, it was no surprise that I almost fell out of my chair when Belle’s voice broke through: “All right, Chase. The asteroid’s in sight.”

  She put it on the display. It was only a light in the sky, indistinguishable from the stars. But, as we watched, its position gradually changed.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “About forty minutes.”

  The tension rose. Even Belle seemed to become nervous as we closed on it. She didn’t, for example, set up her usual countdown when something big was in the works.

  We rode in near silence for about fifteen minutes before Belle spoke again. “It has lights.”

  “Lights?” I asked.

  Alex was seated beside me. “That’s not what I was expecting,” he said.

  She increased magnification on the display. There were three or four lights on the asteroid. But we still couldn’t make out any details.

  “Range 120 klicks,” said Belle.

  “Are they reflections?” Alex asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Could be some stuff left on the ground.”

  As we drew closer, they brightened. And morphed into window lights. “There appears to be a structure,” said Belle.

  It was a house. Like Linda’s, except that it was wider, more spread out, with rounded corners and a tower on one side. “Belle,” said Alex, “hail them for us. Find out if anyone’s there.”

  Belle barely let him finish: “Alex, we have an incoming transmission.”

  “Put it through.”

  A woman blinked on: “Who’s out there?”

  “Belle-Marie,” I said. “We were just looking around. Sorry to disturb you. Can you tell us where we are?”

  She was young and attractive. Golden hair, blue eyes. And, I thought, she was happy to see company. “Don’t you know?”

  Alex, who was not visible to her, frowned at me. “Well, more or less. We didn’t expect to find anybody here.”

  “Actually, there’s a whole community here.”

  “I didn’t know. My locator says you’re KL-4561. Is that correct?”

  “Yeah. That’s us. You alone?”

  “I have one passenger.”

  “Okay. You’re welcome to drop by if you like. We’re always happy to have visitors. Don’t see man
y strangers, do we, Tori?” Someone laughed.

  Alex nodded. Do it.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sure. We’d enjoy stopping for a quick visit if that’s okay.”

  “Beautiful. My name’s Amy. Come on in. We’ll turn the lights on for you.”

  * * *

  We swung around the asteroid to get a good look. “I don’t think it’s the one on the Flex cover,” I said. “But I can’t tell for sure.”

  Alex was pressing his fingertips against his temples, like a guy with a burgeoning headache. “This is not going to be what we’re looking for.”

  More lights came on, and the dome that enclosed the house became visible, along with a docked ship and a second docking area. We eased down into it, connected with the exit tube, and followed it into the dome. The interior had been transformed into a garden filled with hardscrabble plants that must have been able to get along without much sunlight. There were a couple of padded benches, a walkway, and a fountain though the water was apparently turned off. It was chilly but not as cold as I’d expected. As we approached the front door, it opened, and Amy appeared, alongside another woman.

  “Hello,” she said. “Welcome to Amora. This is Tori, my wife.”

  Alex hid whatever disappointment he might have felt. We introduced ourselves and went inside, into a lavish living room, with padded decalite furniture and a large coffee table. Thick curtains covered the windows. Amy drew them aside so we could see the garden and the stars. A piano stood on one side of the room, and pictures of mountains and rivers covered the walls.

  We sat down, and a third woman came out of a doorway, carrying a tray with drinks. “This is Reika. My other wife.” All three looked pretty good.

  We said hello and exchanged introductions.

  “Beautiful home,” said Alex.

  Reika looked around and said thanks while she and Tori served the drinks. Amy retreated into the kitchen and came back with a plate full of chocolate chip cookies. “Sorry, guys,” said Tori, “if we’d known you were coming, we’d have been better prepared.”