“That’s a debater’s trick, turning the question back on me. But it’s time to face the truth, Kim. We’re past our peak. This business here,” he glanced around, taking in the entire banquet room, “is sad. The interstellars are coming home. I don’t like it; it’s not good for business. But it’s the reality. We’re retreating to the Nine Worlds and the big ships are going into mothballs. I wouldn’t say this anywhere else, and if you repeat it I’ll deny it, but the dream you’re talking about was dead before you were born. It’s just that the corpse is still warm.”
“If you’re right,” said Kim, “we have no future. But I’m not ready to fold my cards yet.”
“Good for you.” There was a chill in his voice. “But you’re refusing to look at the facts. Greenway and the other worlds are settling in for the long haul. Nobody’s really going anywhere anymore. Life’s too good for most people. Stay home and party. Let the machines run everything. I’ll tell you what I think about Beacon: Somebody could answer tomorrow, and unless they threatened us, nobody would give a damn.”
She was drinking a strawberry miconda. It was simultaneously cold and heat-producing. Good stuff. “You think it’s a straight downhill run.”
“Last days of the Empire,” he said. “It’s a good time to be alive, except at the very end. If you’re a hedonist. As all men are.”
“Are you, Ben?”
He considered the question. “Not exclusively,” he said at last. His gaze bored into her. “No. You wouldn’t want to mistake me for a hedonist.”
During the course of the evening, she mingled with as many of the guests as she could. She invited everyone to come by the Institute, assured them of private tours, and promised to introduce them to the team that had put Beacon together. By two A.M., when she returned to her apartment weary and more than a little light-headed, she was satisfied that she’d done well by her employer.
But she’d spent six hours on arduous duty and wasn’t quite ready to sleep.
She got a cup of hot chocolate from the dispenser, changed into pajamas, looked through the library, and picked out The Queen Under Fire, an account of the liner’s service during the war against Pacifica. She read for about a half hour and then directed the room to turn out the lights.
They dimmed and went off. A female voice asked whether she wanted anything else.
Kim thought it over and gave her instructions.
She lay back, stared into the darkness, and thought about what Tripley had said. End of the Empire. Truth was, people had probably always been saying things like that. People always believe they live in a crumbling world.
The Star Queen’s flight deck materialized around her.
“Captain, we have company.” Cyrus Klein’s voice was steady.
The situation flashed onscreen. Eight blips moving toward them, intercept course, off the port quarter.
Kim settled into the command chair. “Can you identify them, Mr. Klein?”
“Just a moment, Captain.” His eyes narrowed as he waited for the returns to clear.
“Assume the worst,” she said. “Ahead full. Collision stations. Shields up. Where’s our escort?”
8
Truth is like nudity: It is on occasion indispensable, but it is dangerous and should not be displayed openly. It is truth that gives life its grandeur, but the polite fictions that make it bearable.
—RANDLE ABRAM, Letters to My Son, 241
In the morning Kim ate breakfast with Cole, thanked him for his hospitality, checked her bag through to Terminal City, and caught the shuttle to Sky Harbor.
Interstellar maintained its operations division in the lower hangars on the Plum Deck, so called because of the color of the walls. Kim showed up at the service desk and asked if she could speak with Walter Gaerhard. She gave her name and sat down to wait. A few minutes later a muscular man with skin the color of black ivory opened the door and looked in. “Dr. Brandywine?” he asked.
“Mr. Gaerhard.”
He smiled and offered his hand. “You wanted to see me?”
“For a few minutes.”
“I’m not buying anything.”
“It’s nothing like that. Can I take you to lunch?”
He was looking closely at her, trying to imagine why she was there. “It’s early, Doctor. But thank you. What can I do for you?”
“How good’s your memory?”
“It’s okay.” He led her into a side office. “Are you from Personnel?”
“No. I’m not connected with the company.”
He offered a chair and took one himself. “So what did you want me to remember?”
“I want to go back twenty-seven years.”
“That’s a few.”
“You did some repairs on the jump engines of a yacht owned by the Tripley Foundation. The Hunter.”
His features hardened. “Don’t remember,” he said. “Twenty-seven years is a long time.”
“Interstellar must keep records. Would it help to consult them?”
“Not that far back.”
“You don’t recall working on the Hunter? At all?”
“No.” He stood up. “How could you expect me to? What’s this about, anyway?”
“I’m doing research on the Tripley Foundation. The Hunter is a key part of that history. It was Kile Tripley’s personal yacht.”
“I just don’t remember anything that long ago.” He was leaning toward the door, anxious to be away. “Anything else?”
“I’m not the police,” she said. “I’m not suggesting anything’s wrong.”
“I’m sorry to cut this short but I really have to get to work.” And he literally bolted from the room, leaving her staring after him.
The crash that had killed Kim’s parents was one of those anomalies that isn’t supposed to be possible. People died in accidents: they fell off mountains and sailed into storms and got cramps while swimming, but the transportation systems were very nearly 100 percent safe. Very nearly.
Afterward Kim’s aunt Jessica had taken her in, and among the numerous gifts she received from that fine woman had been an appreciation for mysteries. Although it had taken Markis Kane to introduce her to Veronica King.
On the train home, she dived into The Parkington Horror, one of the earlier adventures of that eccentric private investigator. The detective’s Moor Island home base was filled with artifacts from the early years of settlement. The atmosphere was gothic, the dramas played out in crumbling ruins along the ocean or in upland retreats whose sloping dormers and gray windows reflected the madness of their builders.
But Kim wasn’t able to put the interviews with Tripley and Gaerhard out of her mind. The CEO had convinced her that, if anything out of the way had happened on the last flight, he was unaware of it. And didn’t want to know about it.
Gaerhard, on the other hand, was hiding something. She asked herself what secret he could possibly be guarding? And judging from his reaction, it was a secret that would still get him in trouble, even after all these years. The only thing she could think of was that there had been no mechanical problem with the Hunter, or there had been a different problem from the one claimed. And that he had faked the reports. Which meant he’d been bribed. If so, it suggested the Hunter had returned for reasons other than needing repairs. But what might those reasons have been?
Even if Sheyel was right and there had been a contact, why all the secrecy?
The Seahawk settled into a gentle rocking motion and salt air found its way into the cabin. Occasionally a train hammered past in the opposite direction.
She opened a channel to her office.
“Hello, Kim,” said Andra. “How’d the Star Queen go?”
“Out of this world,” she said. “Are you busy?”
“Sure. I’m always up to my ears. You know that.”
“Right. When you get out from under the pile I want you to do something for me. There was an explosion in the Severin Valley in 573. Side blew out of a mountain, lot of people kille
d. You ever hear of it?”
“Vaguely.” That meant no.
“It happened at Mount Hope. I want you to find everything you can on the event and lay it out for me: media coverage, police reports, whatever. One of the victims, Kile Tripley, was only a couple of days back from an interstellar mission on board the Hunter. Two other members of that crew, two women, vanished at about the same time.” She gave her their names. “Get whatever you can on them, what they did with their spare time, who their friends were, anything you can find. And Kile Tripley too. He was the CEO at Interstellar. And I’d like to know if anybody was ever arrested or charged with anything.”
“Okay. May I ask why?” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.
“Not sure myself yet, Andra. Can you get everything together this afternoon?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Please. And send it to my place. I’ll be going directly home. And Andra—?”
“Yes?”
“There’s an archeologist at Wheeling Bay. Her name’s Kane. Tora Kane. See if you can arrange for me to stop by there tomorrow and see her.”
Kim leaned back, the e-book resting on her lap, and closed her eyes. A shiver of excitement rose up her spine.
When she got home she found a note from Matt congratulating her on what was, “from all reports, an outstanding effort.” She also had a three o’clock appointment next day with Tora Kane at something called the Colson site, along with a code locator for the cab.
Other than Kane’s ex-wives, his only known relative, and the only person with whom he’d maintained a close relationship, was his daughter Tora. Tora Kane had been quoted in the record to the effect that her father had never been the same after the Mount Hope event, that he had tried to stay on at Severin Village, hoping the town could rebuild. But everyone had given up. Too many bad memories. And then the news had arrived that the dam would have to come down.
The ex-wives had all built other lives for themselves. They seemed to harbor no ill will toward Kane, but it was evident that all had made a clean break after the marriages had expired.
She was watching visuals of the daughter when the files on Emily and Yoshi and the Mount Hope event arrived.
Kim collected a dinner of cheese and fresh fruit, and carried it into the living room. She set it on the coffee table, went back for wine, and told Shepard to begin.
Most of the information Andra had gathered about Emily was well known to her, of course. Where she’d gone to school, that she’d written some articles, that she’d been a junior executive for Widebase Communications Systems before landing with the Foundation.
But as she read the articles, looked at the pictures, glossed over comments about her by her colleagues, she began to realize that she’d never been close to understanding the real Emily Brandywine.
An extract from one typical essay revealed the depth of Emily’s commitment:
Somewhere, other eyes than ours watch the stars. Let there be no doubt about that. Were it not so, we would have to confess there is little point to our existence, other than to eat, drink, and procreate. We have come to life on the shore of an infinite sea. Whatever power has designed this arrangement surely intended that we not be alone, that we set out to map its currents and its deeps, explore its islands, and ultimately embrace whatever other sailors we encounter.
Unfortunately, the islands are farther apart than we could have imagined. Many among us suggest we should simply give it up and stay home. Be content under our own warm suns. Hang around on the beach. But I would suggest to you that if we take that course, we will lose that part of us which is most worth preserving: the drive to push into the unknown. If we are true to ourselves, the day will surely come when we lift wine in the company of brothers and sisters born beneath strange suns.
It was a little overwrought, but there was no doubting her sincerity. Emily had not been trained as a scientist, so she tended to draw conclusions based on emotional need rather than on evidence. The human race could not be alone because the universe was so big. Because we needed to have someone to compare notes with.
The reality, of course, was that the appearance of life on Earth seemed to require a set of circumstances so unusual and so fortuitous that it might very well have been a unique event. It was quite possible that the human race was the only intelligent species in all those billions of light-years. In the dark of the night, Kim suspected that was precisely the true state of affairs. She would not have admitted it, not even to Solly. She’d been riding point for too many years, trying to engender enthusiasm for Beacon, which was the only Institute project that seemed to have the capacity to get people excited.
Yoshi Amara had left no written work behind, save her doctoral thesis, which dealt with atmospheric thermodynamics. She was still in her early twenties when she joined the Tripley team. Her flight on the Hunter, as far as Kim could determine, was the first time she’d been away from the home world.
She ran some videos of Emily urging the Algonda Chamber of Commerce to get behind a public funding for elderly citizens; conducting a leadership program for managers at All-Purpose Transport; speaking to the class of ’71 at Mellinda University, saying all the things one usually says to graduates; participating in a symposium on the topic “Where Do We Go from Here?”—which was about population loss and not space exploration—and arguing strenuously for a concerted effort to persuade people to have more children.
She switched over to her Tripley file and watched Kile at the charter meeting of the Foundation, trying to explain why it was essential to pursue the search for celestials. It never seemed to occur to him that they might not exist. He struggled a bit. It was, after all, not an easy argument to nail down. Someone in the audience commented that we all know how humans behave and if there are celestials out there and they operate the way we do, maybe finding them wouldn’t be such a good thing. Let them be, he said.
By midnight she’d concluded that Emily’s companions on the Hunter—Tripley, Amara, and the pilot, Kane—were everything they purported to be. It might be true that all but Kane edged into fanaticism, including Emily, but there was no doubt that, had they succeeded in their attempt to find evidence of other civilizations, had they actually encountered something alive beyond St. Johns, they would have broadcast it to the world.
That meant Sheyel was wrong. Had to be. Yet there was a good chance the shoe from the villa had belonged to Yoshi.
And Gaerhard was hiding something. He’d done what the records indicated was a routine repair job almost three decades ago. And when she mentioned it he knew immediately what she was talking about.
Andra had provided several hundred accounts of the Mount Hope explosion and its aftermath.
Kim studied pictures of the area before and immediately after the explosion. The crater was there, of course, a kilometer and a quarter wide, looking as if someone had dropped a nuke. Trees for vast distances had been scorched and blown down. The valley had been decimated.
There were literally hundreds of pictures of the destruction, buildings wrecked, fires burning, rescue workers pouring in, dazed survivors wandering through the carnage.
Investigators had estimated the yield at several kilotons. But there was no radiation. A government commission had finally labeled the incident “due to cause or causes unknown.”
No record could be found of a vessel that had lost fuel cells, or of improper disposal of spent units. Of course it would not have been in a perpetrator’s interest to get caught, and records were not difficult to falsify.
Authorities pursued independent investigations of both the disappearance of the women, and of the explosion. Neither ever came to anything.
The Mighty Third Memorial Museum was dedicated to the exploits of the Third Fleet during the brief but bloody war with Pacifica. Theory had once held that interstellar war would never happen because of energy consumption limitations, the problems inherent in subduing a planetary-sized hostile population, the impossibil
ity of bringing an opponent’s interstellar force to combat should they wish to avoid it, and the fact that nothing one might steal was worth the effort to carry it off.
All this reasoning broke down because it assumed war was a rational exercise, carried on for rational purposes.
Historically, few leaders have calculated a cost-benefit ratio before plunging into combat. Kings often provoked conflict for the sole purpose of feeding their troops at someone else’s expense. Or to get tens of thousands of malcontents out of the country and pointed somewhere else, as happened during the Crusades, and again on Tigris during the Andrean Wars.
Historians were still arguing over details of the slide sixty years before into the war between Greenway and Pacifica, the only one ever fought between star systems. It was a war that neither side wanted. The critical factor seemed to have been everyone’s conviction that armed conflict was impossible. Both governments therefore had felt free to engage in threats and posturing.
The shooting began when a PacForce destroyer mistook a cruise ship for an intelligence-gathering mission and fired on it, killing 212 passengers and most of the crew. When they refused to apologize—the liner apparently had been off course—the steps to war had followed swiftly one after another.
The conflict eventually raged for eighteen months. There were several major battles. Embargoes were placed on third parties, raids against military targets spilled over and killed tens of thousands, and electronic warfare had constantly shut down power grids and computer systems.
Markis Kane became one of the celebrated names during the war. He began as an escort captain and ended as the commanding officer of a squadron of destroyers. He was decorated half a dozen times. He avenged the worst atrocity of the conflict, the terror attack on Khatalan, which killed sixty thousand people, by destroying the battle cruiser Hammurabi, which had led the assault. His best-known exploit, however, was at Armagon, where his squadron disrupted an attacking line of destroyers. His own vessel, the escort 376, had been badly damaged and was for a time thought lost. He brought it back full of holes, its guidance systems gone, its weapons blown out, half its crew dead. But it had arrived in home skies with all flags flying.
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