Polaris

by Jack McDevitt

  We waited. A dog started barking outside.

  “It just seemed strange. They went walking one night, and he didn’t come home. I think she got tired of him.”

  “Did she give you any reason to believe that?”

  “She struck me as someone who’d get tired of any man pretty quick.”

  “What else can you tell us?”

  “She was a pilot of some sort. She had a pretty high opinion of herself. Thought she was better than everybody else. I was living over in Brentwood when she first came to town. I was at that time just out of school. We both belonged to a theater group. That’s how I met her.”

  “You did some shows together?”

  “Yes. I had a good voice then.”

  “Do you know what she piloted?”

  “I was a singer,” she said. She listed a few of the shows she’d been in. We listened, tried to look impressed, and Alex asked his question again. “Starships,” she said. “Like I told you. She used to be gone for long periods of time. Off to the stars. She’d drop out of sight for months. Even after she got married.”

  “Did they have any children?”

  “No. No time for kids, I guess.”

  “Did they have any family that you knew of?”

  “I really don’t remember, Mr. Benedict. Actually, I’m not sure I ever knew.” She shook her head. “The only thing I can tell you is that she was gone a lot. Then her husband died. And not long after that she took off for good, and we never saw her again.”

  “But she sold the house first.”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.”

  “Did she tell anyone she was leaving?”

  “If she did, I didn’t know about it.” She shrugged again. This time I thought I saw regret. “Don’t know what happened to her.”

  “How long did she live in Walpurgis? Do you know?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe ten years.”

  We went down to the city hall, logged in, and began scrolling through the public record.

  The first item of interest was the dead husband. We found that easily enough in news accounts dated over a twelve-day period in late autumn, 1404.

  CASINO EMPLOYEE FALLS TO DEATH FROM PRECIPICE

  And, eight months later:

  Police denied today they are working on the assumption that Agnes Crisp’s disappearance is connected with the death of her husband last year.

  There were pictures of Agnes, in uniform and in civilian clothes. Some wedding pictures. She and Ed made a handsome couple.

  Ed had been a young worker at one of the casinos. The reports jibed with what Casava had told us. They’d gone out walking one night. To Wallaba Point. According to friends, they went there frequently. It was part of a workout routine. But on that particular evening Agnes admitted there’d been a quarrel. Apparently there was some pushing and shoving, although Agnes denied that she’d sent him over the edge. “He lost his footing,” she’d insisted. “I loved him.” Apparently the police uncovered no convincing evidence to the contrary. No arrest was ever made.

  What had the argument been about?

  “We were trying to decide about kids. I didn’t think we were ready to do that because he didn’t earn that much, and I’d have to give up my career.”

  We checked the almanac. It had been a moonless night, dark and overcast.

  Crisp had had the build of a moonball player. Young, athletic, good features. He wore his black hair cut short in the style of the day. He’d had dark, penetrating eyes, a broad forehead, dark skin. Neatly clipped beard and mustache. Was employed as a host at the Easy Aces Casino. He didn’t look like the sort of person who would accidentally stumble off a cliff.

  There was no avatar available.

  Police had questioned Agnes for several days. People who knew them said there were no problems between them. They were good together, everyone seemed to think. (I wondered if anyone had questioned Casava.) Nevertheless, suspicions in the town ran high.

  Ed Crisp reminded me of somebody.

  “Again?” asked Alex. “Who this time?”

  I was running my interior catalog. Clients. Relatives. People from sims. “James Parker,” I said. The actor.

  “Everybody you see,” he said, “reminds you of somebody else. He doesn’t look at all like Parker.”

  Actually he didn’t. But there was someone. Well, I’d think of it later.

  Casava and her husband had bought the house near the school in 1409. Brackett had picked it up three and a half years earlier.

  The media archives revealed that, on a pleasant day in the late spring of 1405, eight months after Crisp’s death, Agnes had sold her house, left Walpurgis, and not returned. No one knew where she had gone.

  She’d bought the house in 1396. There was no mention of a former husband. Or of children. That seemed to suggest she was not Teri Barber’s mother. It looked as if we were chasing the wrong rabbit.

  “Maybe not,” said Alex. “When people leave a place, they usually stay in contact with somebody. Right? A friend. Someone they’d worked with. Or people down at the club. Agnes did theater.”

  “I don’t—”

  “People don’t do theater without getting close to other people. Can’t be done.”

  “How do you know?”

  He laughed. “I don’t. But I think it has to be true. Yet this woman stayed in touch with nobody.”

  “Nobody that we know of.”

  “Okay. Anyhow, what I was getting at: Who else did something like that?”

  “You mean walked off and disappeared? Taliaferro. But that’s an odd sort of link.”

  “Odd ones are the best. Teri Barber would have been three or four at the time all this happened.”

  “But we don’t have a connection between Barber and Shanley. Other than that they look alike.” I began to suspect we were seeing patterns where none existed. There were all kinds of studies that showed people tended to find the things they looked for, even if some imagination was required.

  Several weeks after Agnes had gone, there was a final piece of news:

  Attempts to identify Edgar Crisp’s family and notify them of his death have been unsuccessful. Crisp was a native of Rambuckle, in the Rigellian system. He came to Walpurgis in 1397.

  “About the same time as Agnes,” I said.

  “Yes.” Alex’s brow furrowed. “Why couldn’t they locate his family?”

  “I don’t know. What are the rules on Rambuckle? I’ve never been there.”

  “Maybe they don’t maintain a directory.”

  “I guess not.”

  He was making faces, the way he always did when he was trying to puzzle something out. “But I wonder whether we’re looking at somebody else with a fictitious identity.”

  “Oh, come on, Alex. If you were going to adopt a pseudonym, would you opt for Edgar Crisp?”

  THirTeeN

  Stride the mountaintops and survey the world. But watch your step.

  —Tora Shawn, Firelight

  In the data banks we found pictures of Agnes’s home. It had looked pretty good at the turn of the century. It was smaller then. A wing had been added since, and that sagging front porch. One of the pictures, taken during a snowstorm, showed a glowing post light—the same one that now leaned sharply toward the walkway—and two people gazing out through the front window. Agnes and Ed? We couldn’t tell. The illumination behind them didn’t reach their faces.

  The media stories described Agnes as a superluminal pilot and indicated she was often gone on long cruises. (In those days, of course, flights could take months. Or even years, if you could pile enough food on board.) They also mentioned that she’d captained the Echo flight. “Incredible,” Alex said.

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s an Echo flight?”

  He took his time answering. “You know the notion that the loss of the people on the Polaris was a supernatural event?”

  “Yes.”

  “In 1400, on the thirty-fifth annivers
ary of the mission, a few people belonging to the Arrowhead Club decided to reproduce the voyage, as nearly as possible.”

  “What’s the Arrowhead Club?”

  “You know it as the Polaris Society today. It was a group of enthusiasts. They chartered the Clermo from Evergreen. The Polaris. What they wanted to do was to try to re-create the original circumstances to see whether the occult event would manifest itself a second time.”

  Sometimes it’s hard to believe the extent of human gullibility. I saw a report recently that more than half the population of Rimway believes astrology works. “I remember hearing about it. The loony flight.”

  “Then you know the rest.”

  “Refresh my memory.”

  “They rechristened the ship Polaris, held a launch ceremony, put six passengers on board, five men and a woman, and went shopping for a female pilot. I guess they wanted a Madeleine English look-alike. So they settled on Agnes.”

  “Did they make her dye her hair?”

  “Don’t know. I guess their big problem was that they thought the occult event they were looking for was connected with the collision between the star and the dwarf. They thought it had released, as I recall, something called ‘psychokinetic energy.’ But they couldn’t very well stage a second smash-up, so they had to settle for hoping that whatever had arrived in 1365 was still hanging around out near the collision site.”

  “But this is what, thirty-five years later? The dwarf star was a long way off by then, and so was whatever was left of Delta Kay. Which, if I recall, was zip.”

  “That’s correct. But I guess they were nothing if not optimistic. They figured out where the debris from the destroyed sun would have gone, and, I suppose, where they could expect to find the spiritual forces. And that’s where they went.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Alex.”

  “Who does?”

  “They must have had some money.”

  “I assume.”

  “So what were they hoping? That they’d all disappear, too?”

  “They took six passengers, like the original flight. One of them was a spiritualist, who thought that if they burned the right sort of candles and set lasers at the right frequency, they would be able to control whatever appeared.”

  “No drums?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “How come you know so much about this?”

  Alex smiled. Man in charge. “This kind of stuff fascinates me. And, from a professional perspective, it’s significant. I always knew there’d be a pile of money to be made if Survey ever turned the artifacts loose. Even artifacts from the Echo flight command a decent sum.”

  That brought up another issue. “Why did Survey sell the Polaris? They must have realized it was going to be worth serious money one day.”

  Alex closed his eyes and shook his head. “It’s hard to understand the bureaucratic mind, Chase. My best guess is that they knew it would take time for the ship to appreciate. And that means the sale gets made on somebody else’s watch. Meanwhile the Polaris hangs around reminding everybody of the organization’s most spectacular failure. Did you know people were actually afraid of it?”

  “Of the ship?”

  “Read the accounts. They were seriously spooked. If an otherworld force could make the passengers disappear, what couldn’t it do? Some people even thought that something might have come back with it.”

  “So what happened on the Echo flight?”

  “They supplemented the AI with black boxes, to record everything. In case it did happen again.”

  “Because the AI had been no help on the original flight.”

  “Right. The black boxes were supposed to have been specially designed to withstand supernatural forces. And continue recording. They were going to trigger and start transmitting as soon as anything out of the ordinary happened.”

  “How’d they define that? ‘Anything out of the ordinary’?”

  “I told you. The presence of psychokinetic forces. The Arrowhead got a lot of publicity, gave all kinds of interviews and whatnot, and took off.”

  “And they didn’t see anything,” I said.

  “They claimed later there were apparitions. That several of the passengers from the original flight made appearances. I forget which ones. A couple of the Arrowhead people came back claiming they understood what had happened, but that humanity wasn’t ready for the truth.”

  “Sounds as if they were reading too much Stepanik Regal.”

  “Yeah. There were stories that the apparitions begged for help. Floated through the ship. Nothing more than spectres. They also said that the candles and lasers kept infernal presences at a distance. There were even some pictures, I believe.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “Haze, it looked like to me. Wisps of fog in the engine room. I remember one of them really looked as if it had eyes.”

  We got names and addresses for neighbors who’d been around when Agnes was in town. We commandeered a booth on the first floor of the city hall and started making calls. I explained that my name was Chase Shanley, that I was a niece of Agnes Crisp, and that the family was still trying to find her. “We haven’t given up,” I told them.

  “She had a nice life here,” one elderly woman said. “She seemed to have enough money, she had a lovely house, and a good husband.”

  “She must have been very unhappy, though,” I said, “when Ed was lost.”

  Some said she hardly went into mourning at all. Others claimed she was distraught. A former casino employee who’d worked with Crisp told us she’d been hit hard by the experience. “She loved Ed,” he said. “It was hard enough on her when she lost him. Then the town turned on her and decided she’d killed him. The truth is that the town was jealous of her. She was a beautiful woman; she goddam flew starships. So, of course, they didn’t like her. That’s why she left. It didn’t have anything to do with feeling guilty, which was what they were all saying. She just got fed up.”

  In fact, everyone spoke well of her. That’s what happens, I guess, when you claim to be a relative. We located a couple of former boyfriends, but both seemed reluctant to give details. “I’m a happily married man,” one said. “She was a nice lady, but that’s all I know.”

  Nobody remembered a daughter. “She liked gardening,” a neighbor said. And she was a skilled chess player. Played down at the club. “Beat everybody, I hear.”

  “Was she capable of pushing someone off a cliff?” Those who knew her personally thought not. She was friendly, they reported. Kind to kids and dogs. She’d never hurt anybody. Although she might have been a bit standoffish. “In what way?”

  “Well,” one woman said, “I always got the impression she thought she was kind of elite. But I never saw a serious flash of temper. Or got mistreated by her.”

  No one had any idea where she’d gone.

  Several believed she might have thrown herself off the same summit that had claimed her husband. The forest was thick at the base of the precipice. Police had looked, but some said not very thoroughly because they never subscribed to the theory.

  “I don’t believe it either,” said Alex.

  Ed Crisp had fallen from a place called Wallaba Point. It was three kilometers northwest of Walpurgis, where the land rose sharply into the foothills of the Golden Horn, a range that comes in from offshore, arcs around the town, and runs southwest almost to the Gulf. There was a fence at the site when Alex and I visited it.

  We got there in the early evening. It was cold and overcast, with a few flakes in the air.

  I don’t mind heights when I’m in an aircraft, but I always get a bit queasy on a stationary perch. It was all I could do to lean out over the fence and look down. The sun had just set. The foot of the precipice was buried in thick forest. There were a river, a few boulders, and, in the distance, a ramshackle shed. It wasn’t really a long way down, but it was sheer and you were going to bounce pretty high when you hit bottom.

 
We paced back and forth, measuring possibilities, wondering precisely from which point Edgar had fallen. Even without the fence, which hadn’t existed when the accident occurred, I couldn’t see how a grown man in possession of his faculties could wander off the edge. The news accounts said no alcohol or drugs had been found. There were no trees near the summit, no bushes, nothing to disguise its existence. The woods ended about fifteen meters away.

  “Couldn’t happen,” I concluded.

  Alex wasn’t so sure. “No moon. Acrimony in the air. She wants to keep her job. He wants kids. But he doesn’t make much, and probably doesn’t have much of a future. So it goes back and forth and he’s not watching what he’s doing.”

  I didn’t believe it. “It’s not possible.”

  “Happens all the time, sweetheart.”

  “It does not happen all the time.”

  “Seriously, Chase, people get excited, and they can lose sight of everything. He’s backing away from her, throws up his hands, trips on a loose rock, and over he goes.”

  “I just can’t see it. Nobody’s that dumb.”

  The hiking trail we were following ran right along the edge. If you decided to play tag up there, you’d back off a good bit, move back by the trees. Your instincts wouldn’t let you do anything else. “I think she killed him,” I said.

  He nodded. “You too? Why?”

  “I think it’s the only way it could happen. They come up here, maybe she’d discovered he’d been cheating, maybe she’d gotten tired of him. They’re in, what, the third or fourth year of their marriage. That’s about the time you find out whether you’ve got a real marriage or not.”

  “When did you become an expert?”

  “It doesn’t take a specialist, Alex. We’re talking about stuff every woman knows but apparently not many guys. If she did it, I doubt it had anything to do with whether they were going to have kids. Anyhow, she probably decided she had an easy way out, she was probably angry, or frustrated, so you get a quick push, and it’s over. Who’d ever know the difference?”