Seeker

by Jack McDevitt

  Waiting for help to come, I thought. Hoping someone would find them.

  “They built some aircraft. And Emil says he found evidence of pretty ingenious food production facilities.”

  The living conditions began to emerge. The polar retreat became a large, sprawling base, much of it underground to facilitate cooling during the summer. Living quarters were necessarily spartan, but functional. Anything that got you away from the sun during solar passage must have looked pretty good.

  I tried to imagine what it had been like when the planet rolled in close. How big had the sun appeared in the afternoon sky? Had it been possible even to stick your head outdoors?

  The answer, according to the estimates we were getting, was a surprise. The experts were saying yes. The amount of heat in the polar regions during the hottest part of the summer was on a par with temperatures at Rimway’s equator. Hot, yes. But downright pleasant in contrast with the rest of the planet.

  By the end of the year, the mission had found the remnants of a library. Several thousand volumes. “But unfortunately beyond recovery,” Brankov said. We had been to lunch with Windy and returned with her to her office to find that piece of news waiting.

  Beyond recovery.

  Brankov let us see the library. An interior room, no windows, walls lined with shelves, shelves filled with mush.

  “Books just won’t survive long under the best of conditions,” he said. “These are the worst.” I vividly remembered the jungle and the damp humid air.

  Eventually the estimate came in: “We think they managed to hang on for almost six hundred years.”

  Brankov looked like a military guy. About fifty. Blond hair cut short, jumpsuit absolutely correct, diction perfect. “They couldn’t maintain their technology. Not indefinitely under these conditions. Eventually they must have simply worn out.” He looked away and shook his head. “You’d have to be here to understand what they faced.” He was in a modular hut, one of those traveling shelters. Through a window, we could see a heavy snowstorm raging.

  “Six hundred years,” said Alex. Back and forth, equator to pole, every twenty-one months, while the world alternately boiled and froze.

  I looked out at the balmy weather that passes for summer in Andiquar. Windy said, “I wonder if anybody ever even looked for them.”

  I was thinking how they’d wanted to be left alone.

  We got more news as we slid into autumn. Some of the original towns were found, the ones built by the first arrivals on Margolia. I wondered whether any part of the house we’d seen in the holograms had survived. And what had happened to the little girl posing so happily with her mother.

  Alex became engrossed in Margolian research. He traveled to libraries on the continent and in the islands. He brought home extracts on the movement, which he read religiously. They were mostly from books that had appeared originally in the twenty-eighth century. A number of them had been privately printed, family histories, church records, journals. He commented that such things survive because they tend to get thrown into trunks or attics, and when they show up a couple centuries later, there’s historical interest. “So people take care of them. Reproduce them. Get through the first two hundred years,” he said, “and you have it made.”

  When I asked what he was looking for, he laughed and pushed a sheaf of documents away. “The Bremerhaven,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to the Bremerhaven.”

  Jacob’s call light began blinking. Transmission for Alex. “Dr. Yashevik, sir. She wants you to call when you have a moment.”

  He told Jacob to connect, and moments later Windy appeared. “Thought you’d like to know. They found this at about twenty degrees south latitude.” The light changed and we were in an excavation, during a blizzard, looking at part of a building. A cornerstone, in fact, with symbols we couldn’t read. Except the number. “It says Paul DeRenne School. 55. We have no idea who Paul DeRenne is.”

  “What’s the number?” asked Alex. “The year it was built?”

  “That’s what they think.”

  Fifty-five. “That would have to be the fifty-fifth year from the foundation of the colony,” he said.

  “Probably.”

  “Has anybody been willing to make a guess how long a year was out there, prior to the event?”

  “They think it would have been about ten percent shorter than a standard year.”

  “So the school was built about forty-nine years after the landing, terrestrial time.”

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “Assuming the colony was founded 2690, that would have been about 2739 by the terrestrial calendar.”

  “Yes.”

  “The thing hit in 2745.”

  “Yeah. I wonder if they even knew it was coming when they built the school.”

  Alex rubbed his forehead. “Probably not. Would the building have been tenable afterward? After the event?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Windy sighed. “If it was, you wouldn’t want to be there during summer or winter.”

  “No,” said Alex. “I guess not.”

  “It would have meant a lot of running around,” I said.

  “They might not have had much choice,” said Alex. “It’s not as if they could have stayed a few months at the pole, and the rest of the year on the equator. They would have needed bases between. Places to stay. Maybe this became one. Spring City. I can’t imagine they were able to stay very long in any one place.”

  “I’m surprised they just didn’t give up,” said Windy. She seemed saddened by the news. I think we’d all hoped the end had come quickly.

  Alex smiled. “Six centuries.” He told Jacob to enlarge the cornerstone. “Incredible.” It had begun to get dark outside. Our outside. Rain clouds building. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “They found a monument. Maybe the place where the colonists first set foot on the ground. Hard to say for sure. Everything’s so broken up.”

  “What’s it look like?”

  The lights flickered and we were standing beside pieces of stone that were being painstakingly reassembled into a wall. There were fragments of an inscription that read, when translated, On this site, and —in the name of—, and foot. And a zero. There’d been another figure in front of the zero, possibly a nine, or an eight. Followed by C.E. “Common Era,” said Windy.

  “It’s Earth-related,” said Alex, for my benefit.

  “We think,” she continued, “the colonists arrived in January 2690. More or less. Emil says they wouldn’t be likely to refer to terrestrial dates, in concrete, except for terrestrial-related events. They can only think of one.”

  She was back on the circuit again just before we closed up for the day. “Got something else. Emil says he thinks they found the ground terminal for the flights down from orbit. It’s in the southern temperate zone.”

  “Jacob,” said Alex, “let’s see the map.”

  I didn’t realize we had one. A globe of Margolia appeared. It showed the now-familiar island-continents, rivers, mountain chains. The location of the south polar base was marked and the various sites that the mission had uncovered.

  Windy told us where the terminal was, and Jacob duly marked it. “It was located just outside a major city.”

  Okay. No surprise there. “Any sign of a lander?”

  “No,” she said. “They’ve scanned the area pretty closely. Emil says the jungle probably ate it. Was there a lander on board the Seeker?”

  “Yes,” said Alex. “It was there.” He signed off and looked at me, waiting for me to say something.

  What did he want from me? “Why are you smiling like that?” I asked. “What’s all this about the lander?”

  “Where is it?”

  “Dissolved,” I said. “Part of the jungle.”

  “How’d they get down from the orbiter?”

  “How’d who get down from the orbiter?”

  “Whoever released the Bremerhaven from its tethers?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t come down. Maybe they—”

  “Right,” he said. “Maybe they boarded the ship.”

  “No. The ship wouldn’t function.”

  “Then where’s the lander?”

  “It’s on the ground somewhere. They’ll find it. It’s buried.”

  “There’s another possibility,” he said.

  “Which is what?”

  “Chase, I want you to do a favor for me.”

  I sighed. Loudly. “Okay.”

  “I’ve been talking to every historian, librarian, and archivist I can think of.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything that might help us. I want you to check something out.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve been to Earth, right? No? Historic place. It’s about time you paid a visit.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The home world exercises its siren call over us all. No matter how far we wander, or how long we are gone, it waits patiently. And when we return to it, as we must, it sings to us. We came out of its forests, waded ashore from its seas. It is in our blood, for good or ill.

  —Ali Barana,

  Go Left at Arcturus, 1411

  Earth.

  It was an odd feeling, seeing Sol up close. The planet floated in the void, with its big scarred moon, and the continents, their outlines familiar, as though I’d been there before. As if I were coming home.

  Harmony, the giant orbiting station, glittered in the night. Harmony was the most recent in a long series of orbiters. It began as a simple terminal and maintenance station a few centuries ago, but they kept adding to it, hotels here and rec areas there and a research facility out back. The original structure was hardly visible anymore, concealed within an array of pods and domes and spheres. There was a long argument raging at the time over whether to upgrade or replace it altogether.

  A liner was leaving as I approached. It passed me, outward bound, light radiating off the bridge and through rows of viewports. It was a big ship, though not in the same league with the Seeker, and certainly not as romantic. As it passed me, it fired its main engines and accelerated away until all I could see was a fading star.

  I turned the Belle-Marie over to the controllers, and they brought us into a docking area crowded with small vessels. Mostly corporate vehicles. A boarding tube attached itself to the hatch, and I climbed out.

  Three hours later I was on the ground, on the original terra firma, asleep in a compartment on a glide train headed west across the North American continent. In the morning I got my first look up close at the Pacific, and caught a commuter flight for the Destiny Islands, the Queen Charlottes in ancient times, about eighty klicks up the coast. I could see traffic moving below, and people on beaches. Flotillas of sailboats dotted the ocean.

  The Destinies consist of more than 150 islands in an area still preserved in a predominantly natural state. There were tall trees, morning mists, and eagles on the wing. I’d never seen an eagle, and I understood immediately why it was an appropriate symbol for an interstellar. I looked down on snowcapped mountains, blue lakes, winding streams. Two days later, on the flight out, I’d see a dozen or so gray whales gliding through the quiet waters.

  I’d made reservations at the White Dove Hotel, at Rennell Sound, overlooking the ocean. They provided a pleasant room, with wide windows and billowing curtains. The Pacific, at least at those latitudes, was more serene than the Eastern Sea at home. Looking west from the hotel, I could see nothing but water.

  It was late morning when I finally got moving. I looked up the name Alex had given me, Jules Lochlear, and asked the AI to connect me with the University of the Americas. Lochlear, I was informed, would be happy to see me in the early afternoon. “At one o’clock sharp.”

  He was located in the upper reaches of the campus library. It was one of those old-style buildings, designed by someone with a penchant for geometry run amok. There were multiple roofs and doors in unusual places. The corners of the various structures were rarely parallel with each other, and even the walkways through the upper tiers rose and fell seemingly at random, and at angles that suggested only an athlete might navigate them safely. It’s a style that somebody once described as an explosion rather than a design.

  I had some trouble finding Lochlear’s office, but I suppose that’s part of the game. He was alone when I got there, working at a table piled high with books and pads. It was spacious, its walls decorated with assorted academic accolades and awards. A large sliding door opened onto a veranda, providing a view of the campus. When I appeared, he didn’t look up, but kept writing in a green folder while using his other hand to wave me toward a divan.

  He was well past his prime years. In fact, I suspected I’d arrived none too soon. He was thin, and his shoulders were bent. A few strands of white hair complemented bushy eyebrows. His eyes were watery, and he seemed frail beyond endurance. “You must be Ms. Kolpath,” he said, in a surprisingly steady voice, still without taking his eyes off the paperwork.

  “That’s correct, Professor.”

  “Very good, young lady. I’ll be with you in just a moment.”

  It took a bit longer than that, but finally he expressed his satisfaction with the task at hand, put the pen down, and favored me with a glance. “Forgive me,” he said. “Stop in the middle of one of these things, and sometimes it takes an hour to get back to where I was.”

  “It’s okay. It’s good to meet you.” Alex had described him as a historian and an archivist. “What is it you’re working on, Professor?” I asked, by way of launching the conversation.

  “Oh, nothing, really.” He pushed back from the table. “It’s just something I’ve been toying with.” He tried a dismissive smile, but he didn’t mean it.

  “What is it?” I persisted.

  “It’s The Investigators.”

  “The Investigators?” I asked.

  “It’s a play. I expect they’ll be performing it at the Theater by the Sea next season.”

  “I didn’t know you were a playwright,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m not. Not really. I’ve done a few. But they never get beyond the local group. You know how it is.”

  I had no idea. But I said yes, of course.

  “I do murder-mystery comedies,” he said. “Eventually, I’d like to see one of them go all the way to Brentham.”

  I pretended I understood the significance. “That would be nice,” I said. “Good luck, Professor.”

  “Thank you. I’m not optimistic.”

  “What do you teach?” I asked.

  “Not a thing,” he said. “I taught history at one time, but that’s long ago. I got tired trying to persuade reluctant students, so I gave it up.”

  “And now you—?”

  “I’m seated firmly in the Capani Chair. Which means I work with occasional doctoral candidates. God help them.” He laughed and got up, tottered momentarily, but hung on and laughed. “The floor’s not as steady as it used to be. Now, I believe you’re here to—” His voice trailed off, and he rummaged through another pile of papers, gave up, and opened a cabinet. More searching, then his features brightened. “Yes,” he said, “here it is. Ms. Kolpath, why don’t you come with me?” He headed for the veranda. The door slid open, and he led the way outside. “Be careful,” he said.

  He immediately gained strength. His frailty slipped away, and he moved almost with the ease of a young man. When I stepped out behind him, and my weight melted off, I understood why. “Antigrav units,” I said.

  “Of course. You’re about thirty percent normal weight at the moment, Chase. May I call you Chase? Good. Please watch your step. Sometimes the effect induces a sense of too much well-being. We’ve had people fall off.”

  We were on one of the ramps I’d seen from the ground. Its handrails consisted of ornately carved metal, and it angled sharply up to one of the rooftops. Lochlear started to climb, moving with practiced ease.

  We went to the top and strode out o
nto the roof. He walked with a casual inattention that, combined with his frailty and reduced weight, left me worried that the wind—which was steady and coming in off the ocean—might blow him off. He saw my concern and laughed. “Have no fear,” he said, “I come this way all the time.”

  I gazed across the rooftop at the sea. “It’s lovely,” I said.

  “This is where I get to be young again. For a few minutes.” We hurried past chairs and tables, and reentered the building through a double door. I couldn’t figure out what all the rush was about, until I realized that Lochlear did everything on the run.

  We pushed through a set of curtains and entered a long, narrow room, crowded with shelves and files and chips and books and display cases. The cases held individual volumes. “They’re here somewhere,” he said. “I thought I’d set them aside after the messages from your Mr. Benedict.” The books on display were old, the covers discolored and worn, and in some cases missing. He opened a cabinet door, peered inside, and brightened. “Here it is,” he said. He removed a box, set it down on a table, and began to go through it. “Yes.” He pulled out several labeled containers. “Good.” He dusted them off, sorted them, put a couple back, and placed the rest in front of me. There were four of them. Each held eight disks. The labels read COLLIER ARRAY, UNCOLLATED, and were marked with catalog numbers.

  “Tarim?” he said.

  An AI’s voice replied, gently, “Good afternoon, Dr. Lochlear.”

  He turned to me. “Chase, Tarim will be happy to assist you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “One more thing: These are quite valuable. Please be careful. The scanner is over here by the wall if you wish to make copies. You won’t be able to take the originals out of the room, of course. If you need to speak with me, just tell Tarim, and he’ll put you through. When you’re finished, please leave everything on the table. It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Chase.” Then he was gone. The door closed behind him with an audible click.