Seeker

by Jack McDevitt

  There was a long silence. I became gradually aware of someone standing behind me, near the office door. It was a tall, dark-skinned man of middle age, dressed in clothing from another century. Cream-colored vest, loose black shirt open to the navel, the sort of white slacks you might wear at sea. Everything a bit more garish than you could get away with today. He smiled, looked at me, then at Alex, and said hello in the deepest baritone I’d ever heard.

  “Harry Williams,” said Alex, sitting up.

  “At your pleasure, sir. And, Chase, I would not be too quick to dismiss the possibility they survived.” He crossed the room, and took a seat in the armchair closest to Alex. “Do you think you can find the colony world?”

  I froze the picture. “Alex, I understood no likeness of him had survived.”

  “You just have to persevere.” He grinned. “Never give up. That’s my motto.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “In fact, there are a few of them. This one came from a set of memoirs by a contemporary.”

  The guy looked good. Noble aspect and all that. I could understand why people were willing to follow him. Even to distant places that didn’t have restaurants. Alex flipped through his notebook and reactivated Harry. “The goal was ‘to create free minds in a free society.’ Right, Harry?”

  “Your words?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Noble sentiment.”

  He nodded. “Unfortunately, the truth is it’s pure hyperbole. Nobody lives in a free society.”

  “We do.”

  “I doubt it. We all believe what our parents believed. You get filled up during the first few years when the mind is open to everything, and you assume adults know what’s going on. So you’re vulnerable. And if later on you decide to reject the local mythology, whatever it might be, you pay a price. Parents frown, old friends are shocked, you get ostracized. There’s no such thing as a completely free society.” A sofa appeared and he unwound into it.

  “You’re not talking about us,” I said.

  He smiled. “Freedom’s an illusion.”

  We looked at one another across the expanse of the office. At that moment we might have been separated by light-years. Alex grinned at me. Are you really going to argue philosophy with this guy?

  I plowed ahead. “Harry, aren’t we exaggerating a trifle?”

  “We’re tribal, Chase. We talk about freedom, but you better not say things the tribe doesn’t care to hear. Or act outside approved norms.”

  “For example?”

  “I don’t know where I am.” He looked around the room, at the antiques on display for clients. At the several framed commendations. “You collect artifacts.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is your profession.”

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  “On-site? You recover some of them personally?”

  That much was evident from the framed scroll presented us by Coryn University. “Yes. Sometimes.”

  He looked over at Alex. “Have you and your associate been accused of being grave robbers?”

  “That’s very good,” Alex said.

  “So much for your free society.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How is it different? You’re making an honest living, are you not? But there’s this tribal instinct about burial places being sacrosanct. Unless you work for a museum.”

  Alex broke in. “Maybe we can hash this out another time. Harry, we’d like to find the colony world. Do you know where it is?”

  “I have no idea. None whatever. The sources Jacob tapped to create this program did not have that information.”

  “Pity.”

  The guy had charisma. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. Presence. I sat there knowing I was in the company of a heavyweight. The way he smiled, the way he crossed one leg over the other, the way he engaged with us. He was accustomed to giving direction, taking charge, confronting what he had to. And I know that’s all part of the installation program, and the real Harry Williams might have been quite different. But nevertheless, his dialogue and persona were both extracted from what was known about him. “How long has it been?” he asked.

  “Nine thousand years.”

  His eyes widened at that. He took a deep breath. Swallowed. And I saw fear in his expression. “Are you telling me you don’t know where they are?”

  “No.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Nothing’s been heard from them. Ever.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since they left Earth.”

  He’d almost stopped breathing. “My God.” He threw his head back. “I don’t understand how that could be. May I ask where we are?”

  “We’re not on Earth,” said Alex.

  “Amazing.” He smiled. “This isn’t a joke, is it?”

  Alex shook his head. No.

  Harry got up, went to the window, and looked out. “It looks like home.”

  “Most of the garden is designer plants. Everything else, trees, grass, you name it, is native to Rimway.”

  “And that is the name of this place? Of this world?”

  “Yes. We are well out toward the edge of the Orion Arm. At one time, no human world was farther from Earth.”

  “Wonderful,” he said. But there were tears in his eyes. “And you never came across the colony?”

  “No.”

  “In nine thousand years?”

  “No.”

  “Incredible.”

  I felt sorry for him.

  “Was there any contact at all after they left Earth?”

  “None that we know of.”

  “Well,” he said, “that was the plan. I thought we were being optimistic.”

  I listened to voices outside. Kids playing somewhere close by.

  “You kept your secret too well, Harry. It’s not available to us. And therefore not to you.”

  “Something went wrong.”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “It’s hard to understand what could have happened. We planned to be on our own until we put together the kind of society we wanted. But to disappear forever? That’s inconceivable. It couldn’t have happened.”

  “It was a risky venture,” I said. “Surely you knew that.”

  “We considered every eventuality.”

  “You missed something.”

  “Yes. It would seem so.”

  Alex shook his head, puzzled. “Harry, you did not have FTL communications, did you?”

  “No.”

  “So if a major problem did develop, you had no way to get help. Other than sending back either the Bremerhaven or the Seeker.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Which meant help was two years away.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you driving at, Alex?” I asked.

  “Mattie Clendennon says the Wescotts found the Seeker adrift. That at the time it broke down, or whatever, it was loaded with passengers.” He returned his attention to Harry. “Were there any plans to move large chunks of the population elsewhere? After you colonized Margolia?”

  “We thought it might happen. In time. But no, we had no relocation plans. There weren’t enough of us even to consider anything like that.”

  “So where were they going?” When Harry shook his head, Alex asked whether there were other ships in the group.

  “No. Only the two transports.”

  “The two interstellars were old when you bought them, right?”

  “Yes, Alex. That’s correct. But they were certified for us. We spent the money to have them inspected and maintained.”

  “But according to the record, after each of the missions they made for you, they had to be refitted. If they’d both broken down, or maybe were allowed to fall into disrepair, your people might easily have been stranded.”

  “The odds against both of them breaking down were pretty long, Alex.”

  “I’m not so sure. They’d have required maint
enance. Were you prepared to maintain them? Over an extended period of time?”

  “Yes. We had a service organization.”

  “What about after the first generation died off? Was there a program to ensure replacements?”

  “Not when we left, of course. It wasn’t one of the things we were especially worried about. Look, we had a hospitable world to go to. It was safe. We took all the technology with us that we could possibly need. We wanted no contact with Earth, and we set things up deliberately so that none would be necessary.” He seemed to take a deep breath. “I can’t get hold of the time,” he said. “Nine thousand years is just too long. Is there still an organized political system on Earth?”

  “Yes, Harry,” said Alex.

  “What kind of system is it? What kind of system do you live under?”

  “We have a republic. As does Earth. We’re spread out now across more than a hundred worlds. And you’ll be happy to know we live well, we have free institutions, by any reasonable definition. And life is good.”

  “That amazes me.”

  “You didn’t think we would do well?”

  “We weren’t doing well in my time.” He looked out across the lawn. It was getting late in the day, and the sky was gray and cold. “It feels so much like home.”

  Something flapped past too quickly to allow a good look. He stared after it. “I just can’t believe I’m actually on another world.”

  “We don’t think of it that way.”

  “I guess not. Is that a cemetery over there?”

  “Yes. It’s just off the property line.”

  “It looks old.”

  “It was there when I was a boy, growing up here.” Alex smiled. “I was always scared of it.”

  “How long have we been here? On Rimway?”

  “A long time. More than six thousand years.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve been here longer than we’d had civilization on Earth.”

  “About the same length of time.” Alex’s gaze was locked on him. “So you didn’t like life in the American Republic?”

  “We were looking for a better place.”

  “Where’d you get the starships?” I asked.

  “The Seeker was bought from Interworld. A salvage dealer. The Bremerhaven was built by the Chinese. It was a famous ship in its time. It was part of the fleet that hauled people and equipment to Utopia.”

  “Utopia?” I asked.

  Harry sighed. “It was an early effort to colonize. It didn’t go well. Either.” He wandered over to the bookcase and began examining the titles. “I never heard of any of these people,” he said.

  Alex waved the comment aside. “Was it your idea to head out to the stars?”

  Harry looked tired. “I doubt it was the idea of any single individual.” He seemed to be trying to remember. “It was probably an idea that grew out of the group. I don’t recall any one person coming forward with it. There was a lot of talk about getting away. Could we get a ship? Could we find a place of our own? In the beginning, it was just talk.” He looked overcome with emotion. “A place of our own. It became our mantra.”

  “How did you find five thousand people willing to go?”

  “Fifty-three hundred is closer to the correct figure. We started with eighty. But the genetics wouldn’t work, so we opened the plan to friends. Others who were tired of the kind of society they lived in.”

  “And they joined?” I said.

  He laughed. “Not many people, even the bravest, are willing to leave home permanently. But there was a steady stream until finally we had to cut it off.”

  “There’d been other settlement attempts. You mentioned Utopia.”

  “Yes. By the time we were ready, there was already a history of failure. They’d been at it for a long time when we launched.”

  “How’d the government react? Did they make an effort to stop you?”

  “They were glad to see us go. We were branded as unpatriotic by unofficial spokesmen, and eventually by the general population. But we were actually given whatever assistance we needed.”

  “Who decided which world you’d settle?”

  “No one person. We sent out a few of our people, a group of scientists, and some other specialists. They found the place—”

  “And were sworn to secrecy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it possible to keep such a secret.”

  “Alex,” he said, “we all understood that if anyone compromised the location of the colony world, we would be followed by all the evils and stupidities we were trying to leave behind. Do you know where Margolia is?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “It appears we were successful.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “You have any ideas?”

  “We could hunt through every system in the Wescott record. But we have no guarantee the Seeker wasn’t somewhere else.”

  “Chase, you said they were allotted a specific area of sky for each mission. How big is the area?”

  “Big.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Out where the Wescotts were, it probably holds thirty thousand class Gs.”

  “Well, at least that narrows it down.” He glanced at Jacob’s control panel. “What about the AI?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Maybe we’ve been taking the wrong tack. Instead of trying to find their leased vehicle, maybe we should have been looking for the Survey ship they used.”

  “The Falcon.”

  “Was that its name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would the AI have recorded everything?”

  “Yes. But the Wescotts could have deleted whatever they didn’t want known.”

  “That’s a pretty serious offense, isn’t it? If they get caught?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said nobody ever checks the AIs. So why bother changing it?”

  “That’s a point,” I said. “But before you get excited, Survey reconditions the things every few years. They come in, clear the system, maybe upgrade it, and reinstall it.”

  “Every few years?”

  “Yes. The AI the Wescotts had would have been cleared a long time ago.”

  He sat quietly and made a few offhand comments about the weather and the cemetery, and on a few business-related matters. I thought the subject had been dropped until he said, abruptly, “Let’s give it a try anyhow.”

  “Give what a try?”

  “The AI. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Alex, there’s no point.”

  “There’s nothing to lose. Let’s get on the circuit and ask. Maybe they download everything into a master file. Who knows?”

  He went off for lunch with a client. I called Survey and got one of their avatars. Elderly man, this time. A bearded eminence. “Yes, young lady,” he said, “how may I be of service?”

  I told him what I wanted, that I was looking for details on the Wescott flights during the 1380s and early ’90s. That I hoped that data from the Falcon AI might be available.”

  “We have the official logs on file, you know,” he said, as if that solved everything.

  “Yes, of course. But we think there might have been an error. We’d like to recover the AI, if that’s possible.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you to hold a moment, please?”

  He was gone. Survey is like most other bureaucracies. When they ask you to hold, they pump images of waterfalls and sandy beaches and mountaintops at you, throw in some soft music, and keep you waiting an hour. This was different. I got the waterfall, but they were back within a minute. A human being this time.

  “Hi, Chase,” he said. “I’m Aaron Winslow. You wouldn’t remember me but we met at the Polaris event last year.”

  “The one that blew up.”

  “Yes. What a terrible thing that was. But I was glad to see most of us c
ame through it okay. How can I help you?”

  “Aaron, I work for Rainbow.”

  “Yes, I know. Alexander Benedict’s company.”

  “Right. I was doing some research on the deaths of the Wescotts, back in ’98. I was hoping that the AI from their ship, the Falcon, might have survived.”

  “After thirty years? I don’t think so, Chase. They’re absolutely religious about reprogramming them at six-mission intervals.” He was biting his lower lip. “You say they used the Falcon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.” He looked off to one side, probably at a data screen. “Hold on a second.”

  “Okay.”

  “The Falcon’s before my time. In fact, it was sold off after its last mission with the Wescotts.”

  “Was there a problem?”

  “No. It had forty years’ service. That was as long as they kept them then.”

  “They keep them longer now?”

  “Fifty-five. We buy better stuff now.”

  “What happens to a ship when its time is up?”

  “We sell it if we can. Junk it if we have to.”

  “Do they clear off the AI when that happens?”

  He looked puzzled. “You know, I really have no idea. It’s not something I ever thought to ask.” He made a face and drummed his fingertips on a flat surface. A desktop, probably. “Hold on a second, Chase.”

  The scenic images came back. Sand dunes this time. And music designed to make you feel affectionate toward Survey. Then he reappeared. “They tell me we do now. But at the turn of the century, we don’t know whether they bothered. There was a court case eighteen years ago. That’s what got us serious about it, so now everything gets cleared.”

  “Can you tell me specifically what happened to the Falcon?”

  “Let me check,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  You should understand I had no hope whatever that anything would come of the inquiry. But Alex expected me to be thorough.

  When Aaron called back, he had a piece of paper in front of him. “Chase,” he said, “it was purchased in 1392 by the Hennessy Foundation.”