Seeker

by Jack McDevitt

  “No,” I said. “It just seems a bit unusual.”

  “Where better?” She studied me, making up her mind whether I was friend or whatever, and came down on my side of things. “Would you like a drink?”

  She mixed us a couple of black bennies while I drew one of the curtains aside and looked out the window. Wetland, which should have been on the horizon, was missing. In its place I saw a city with minarets and towers. “Baghdad,” she said, “in its glory days.”

  It was a projection. “It’s lovely,” I said.

  “You should see it at night, when it lights up.” She handed me my drink. “I decided I didn’t like life on Rimway very much. So I’ve gone back to a better time.”

  I looked around the room, with its climate control and its synthetic walls and its VR capability.

  She laughed. “That doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I get the best of both worlds here. Baghdad is romantic, but needs to be kept at a distance.”

  I sampled the black benny and complimented her on it.

  “It’s my favorite.” She started to sit but changed her mind. “Here, Kolpath, let me show you something.” We walked back out into the passageway, made a couple of turns, passed through several rooms, and came into an enormous chamber. Just enough sunlight filtered into it to cut through the gloom. It was filled with clay pots and more stone cylinders. All were engraved. “Each group tells a story,” she said. “Over there, the deeds of Sennacherib. To your right, the glories of Esarhaddon. There—” She produced a lamp, turned it on, and directed the beam onto a podium. “The Crystal Throne itself.”

  It glittered brilliantly in the lamplight.

  “What’s the Crystal Throne?”

  “Sargon, my dear. My, they did neglect your education, didn’t they?”

  “Sometimes I think so.”

  She laughed, a pleasant sound like tinkling ice cubes. “You’re a security officer of sorts, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Of sorts. Actually, the AI handles the security.” She smiled. “Just in case you had any ideas.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” I said. “I’ve no use for a crystal throne.”

  We returned to the sitting room, where she produced another round of drinks. “Now,” she said, “what is this about Margaret that brings you to the palace?”

  “She was a close friend of yours, wasn’t she?”

  “Margaret Wescott.” She looked around the room, as if trying to locate something. “Yes. I never knew anyone else like her.”

  “In what way?”

  “She was a marvelous woman. She cared about things. You got her for a friend, you knew she’d always be there if you needed her.”

  “How about Adam? How well did you know him?”

  She thought it over. “Adam was okay. He was like most men. A bit slow. Self-absorbed. I don’t think he ever appreciated what he had. In her, I mean.”

  “He took her for granted?”

  Smile. “Oh, yes. Adam was too busy looking at the stars, worrying about things that were far away, to see what was under his nose.”

  “But he didn’t mistreat her?”

  “Oh, no. Adam wouldn’t have harmed a fly. And he loved her. It was just that it was a kind of limited love. He loved her because she was physically attractive, and she enjoyed the same kinds of things he did, and because she shared his passion for the outer boundaries. And because she was the mother of his daughter.” She looked around the room again. “It’s depressing in here. Why don’t we open the curtains, dear?”

  I helped, and sunlight streamed in.

  “Much better,” she said. “Thank you. Have you met their daughter? Delia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sweet young thing. She has a lot of her mother in her.”

  She paused, obviously lost in the past. I took advantage of the opening: “Did Margaret ever suggest to you that she and Adam might have discovered something unusual during one of their flights?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course. Did you know about that?”

  “I know they found something.”

  “She always told me to keep it quiet.”

  “What did they find?” I asked.

  She drew back into the present and looked at me closely, trying to decide whether she could trust me. “Don’t you know?”

  “No. I know there was a discovery. I’m not sure what it was. Did they find Margolia?”

  Her eyes locked on me. “They found the Seeker,” she said.

  “The Seeker.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “They went back several times, trying to extract information from it. But everything was too old.”

  “I’d think so.”

  “They hoped it would tell them where Margolia was.”

  “And it didn’t.”

  “No. But they didn’t have enough time. They were still working on the problem when they went out on that damned skiing vacation.”

  “Where is the Seeker?”

  “I don’t know. She told me once, but I really have no recollection. Just coordinates. Numbers, and who remembers them?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Did she write it down?”

  “If she did, it’s a long time gone.” She managed another smile. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you hoped to hear.”

  “No, it’s okay. But they actually found the Seeker.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

  “I didn’t think they’d want me to. I wouldn’t have told you if you hadn’t mentioned Margolia. You already had part of the story. So I figured no harm done.” She looked cautiously at me. “I hope I’m right.”

  “I’ve no interest,” I said, “in damaging anyone’s reputation. I understand they boarded it.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Can you tell me what they saw?”

  “A dead ship.” She lowered her voice, as if we were in a sacred place. “It was carrying a full complement.”

  “Of crew?”

  “Of passengers. I’ll never forget the look on Margaret’s face when she told me.”

  My God, I thought, the ship’s capacity was, what, nine hundred people?

  “Lost together,” she said. “Whatever happened, they were lost together.”

  When I got back to the office, a call from Delia Wescott was waiting for me. “I have something you might want to see. Can you come to the island?”

  Delia lived on Sirika, which was several hundred kilometers southeast of Andiquar. I got directions from her and grabbed a southbound train for Wakkaida, which is a seacoast community. From there I took a cab, settled into the backseat and relaxed while it rose above the shoreline and headed out to sea.

  It was early evening by then. The skies were clear, and the first stars had shown up in the east. The cab passed over a pair of large islands and joined some local traffic. Sirika appeared on the horizon. It was an unremarkable place, mostly just a refuge for people with a lot of money and an inclination to get away. Its population was only a few thousand.

  Its houses were all outrageously big, and they came with columns and colonnades and pools. They all had boathouses, which looked better than most people’s homes.

  We angled down toward a villa situated on a hilltop. It was modest, as things went in that neighborhood, located amid a vast expanse of lawns. There was a decent guesthouse off to one side. We drifted toward the landing pad, and Delia got on the circuit. “Welcome to Sirika, Chase.” A door opened below, and two kids, a boy and a girl, charged out onto the walkway. Delia followed behind.

  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 th
ey 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.

  ELEVEN

  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 asse
mble 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.”