Polaris (12 page)

There weren't more than about fifteen people in the audience, maybe a quarter of the room's capacity. But it was early yet; people were still coming in. “The alien wind,” one of the panel members was saying, “was more like a gale. It blew through the ship. It was able to do so because it consisted of anti-particles. They don't interact with regular particles; therefore, the hull doesn't present a barrier.” The speaker was well along in years, dignified, the kind of guy you might have mistaken for a physician, almost persuasive. But I knew just enough science to know he was talking nonsense.

The audience seemed to take him seriously, though. At least seriously enough to agree or, in some cases, to try to refute the argument. One energetic woman protested vehemently that such a thing could not happen, and the debate wandered into talk about electrons and properties of space curvature and momentum.

The topic was, I thought, appropriately named. I moved down the corridor to the next room.

They were discussing whether one of the human worlds, most
probably Toxicon, had sent a mission to co-opt the
Polaris,
grab the passengers, and put them to work in a secret project. An elderly woman whom everyone called Aunt Eva pointed out that the passengers included two medical researchers, a cosmologist, a science popularizer, a politician, and a psychiatrist. The politician and the cosmologist were retired. What sort of project would require the services of such a diverse group?

The answer came back that the kidnappers only wanted Dunninger and Mendoza. The neurobiologists. Did the audience know they were working on life extension?

Of course it did.

Somebody pointed out that the way to find the culprits was to look for a world whose politicians had stopped ageing.

The most popular explanations inevitably involved aliens. It provided an easy response to all difficulties. If there was a threatening alien presence, and the ship was ready to jump into Armstrong space, why didn't it do so? Answer: The aliens had a device that prevented it. Why didn't Maddy send a Code White? Same answer.

What were the aliens up to? There was widespread disagreement. Some thought they wanted a few humans to dissect. Others, that they were measuring human capabilities. That was why they'd selected this particular mission, with its all-star passenger list. That notion led to a whole other line of thought: that the aliens lived unknown among us and might take us at any time. That they looked like humans, but inside one would find a heart of darkness.

Some pursued a culinary argument, that the aliens merely wanted to find out whether we were digestible. Or tasty. Apparently, judging by the fact there'd been no incidents since, we did not suit their palate.

Dr. Abraham Tolliver read a paper arguing that the
Polaris
was indeed seized by an alien force, that the Confederacy and the Mutes had been aware of the existence of this force since pre-Confederate times, that the long on-again, off-again conflict between humans and Mutes was a hoax. What was actually happening, he said, was that both species recognized the presence of a lethal threat “out there somewhere,” and that the war had been trumped up between two allies to mask an arms race that would provide for the day when the attackers actually came.

The
Polaris
had its historians as well as its speculators. I wandered into a panel titled “Why Did Maddy Become a Star-Pilot?”

The credit, or the blame, was laid on her father's shoulders. Maddy was one of six kids for whom the bar was set high, for whom no accomplishment was ever sufficient to merit praise. The father, who had the unlikely given name Arbuckle, was a small-town merchant who was apparently unsatisfied with his own life and consequently sought to taste success through his children, three of whom eventually needed psychiatric help.

One panelist thought Maddy had chosen her field in a failed attempt to satisfy him. (He was reported to have told her, at the graduation ceremony, that she should keep striving, that she could do better.) Another panelist thought she'd done it in order to get as far as possible from him.

Tab Everson was at the convention. He was scheduled to give a presentation, so I went. When he was introduced, he received loud applause for having given proper disposition to the remnants of the
Polaris
artifacts.

He thanked the audience and explained that he had been aboard the
Polaris
a couple of years earlier. “They call it the
Sheila Clermo
now,” he said, “but we all know what's really inside the Foundation trappings.” He talked about Evergreen, which specializes in adapting crops and vegetation for use in off-world settlements, and in environmental pursuits. He had pictures of the CEO who had bought the ship, of the young
Sheila,
of the interiors, of the ship itself as it left dock on the day he'd visited. No theories anywhere, just a tour. He was in fact one of the more effective presenters of the evening.

A young woman on a panel titled The Grand Illusion insisted she'd seen Chek Boland less than a year earlier. “It was right here, beneath the statue of Tarien Sim at the White Pool. He was just standing there, gazing across the gardens. Last summer. Last summer, it was.

“When I tried to talk to him, he turned away. Denied everything. But I'd know him anywhere. He's older, of course. But it
was
him.”

Then there was the Black Ship session, with four panelists and a crowded room. The panelists were described by the moderator as various sorts of
experts on the
Polaris.
Apparently all had published something on the subject, which seemed to be the prerequisite for being recognized as an authority.

Each made a brief statement. In essence, two of them maintained there
had
been a black ship; the others insisted there had not.

“What's a black ship?” I whispered to a young man next to me.

The question seemed to startle him. “The conspirators,” he said.

“What conspirators?”

“It's the ship that took them away. Maddy and the passengers.”

“Oh. Toxicon again?”

“Of course not.” He might have been annoyed because I'd become a distraction to the quarrel that was breaking out in the front of the room.

A man who looked and talked like a lawyer had the floor. “The Trendel Commission,” he was saying, “ruled that out at the time. During the incident, no interstellar was unaccounted for.”

The idea seemed to be that a small private group, with the connivance of one of the persons on board the
Polaris,
had arrived in the neighborhood and succeeded in gaining entry before anyone realized their purpose. The intention was to demand ransoms for the return of the passengers. Because of their celebrity, the payoff would have been substantial.

The problem with this theory was that no ransom demand had ever been received. But that could be explained, too. The victims were taken aboard the other ship, awaited their chance, and stormed the bridge. In the ensuing melee, the black ship was damaged and was floating through Armstrong space, where it could never be found. An alternate theory was that during the fighting, one or more of the kidnap victims had been killed, thereby making it too risky to return the others. Again, there was a difficulty with both scenarios: No ship had gone missing during the target period.

A woman wearing a gold scarf was trying to shoot down that objection. “All it needed,” she said, “was for somebody to gundeck the data. Damn, why is everyone so blind?”

So the debate went round and round.

At the height of all this, Cazzie Michaels showed up. He came in and sat down beside me, but I didn't notice he was there until he reached over and tugged on my arm. “Hi, Chase,” he said.

Cazzie was an occasional client. He had a passion for anything that
came from the preinterstellar period. Which was to say, terrestrial artifacts. There just aren't many of those around anymore.

I smiled back and, to my horror, he told me
we'd
straighten everything out about the black ship, and rose to be recognized. The moderator addressed him by name.

“Frank,” he said, “we have Chase Kolpath with us.” I cringed. “She pilots superluminals, and could probably settle some of these questions.”

“Good.” Frank looked at me and canted his head. Cazzie kept urging me to stand, and there was nothing for it but to comply. “Ah,” he said, “is that true, Chase? You're a pilot?”

“Yes,” I said. To my surprise, I got a round of applause.

“Chase, help us here. Is it possible to assign limits to where starships can be at any given time?”

“Even with the quantum drive,” I said, “there are limits. But during the period you're talking about, they were much more pronounced. Then, government and commercial carriers were required to send movement reports to the controlling station every four hours. If a report went missing, alarms went off. So they always knew where you were. Private vehicles—and there just weren't very many of those—could participate if they wanted. Some did, some didn't.

“So it's easy enough to rule out the vast majority of the fleet. With the ships that are left, you can look at their ports of call and determine whether it was possible for any of them to get close to the target area. My understanding about the
Polaris
incident is that Delta Karpis is too far, and the commission was able to eliminate any possibility of another ship.”

The audience stirred. Someone said, “I told you so.”

One session employed an avatar of Jess Taliaferro, the Survey operations chief who had organized the mission. He talked about how pleased he'd been at the opportunity to give something back to Klassner and the others, how carefully they had planned everything, and how devastating the news had been.

I was standing beside an elderly couple loaded down with items from the souvenir shop. They had books, chips, a model of the
Polaris,
a
Polaris
scarf, and pictures of Maddy and her passengers.

I said hello, and they smiled. “I remember when it happened,” the man said, trying not to drop anything. “We didn't believe it. Nobody did. Thought the early reports were mistaken. That they'd turn up belowdecks or something.”

The formal part of the presentation ended. It had been almost over when I walked in. “Unfortunate man,” said the woman.

She meant Taliaferro. “I suspect,” I said, “the experience marked him the rest of his life.”

She had gone gray and seemed frail, yet she possessed a robustness of spirit that flashed in her eyes. “Of course,” she said. “Look at what happened to him afterward.”

“What happened afterward?” I asked.

Both seemed surprised at the question. “He disappeared, too,” she said. “Never got over the shock, I suppose. Two, three years afterward he walked out the front door of Survey's operations center, and nobody ever saw him again.”

They'd opened the floor for questions, and the audience couldn't resist asking where Taliaferro had gone that afternoon fifty-seven years ago.
“It was a bright summer day,”
the avatar said.
“Nothing out of the ordinary had been happening. I cleared off my desk, cleared
everything,
which was unusual for me. So it was obvious I knew that would be my last day on the job.”

“So what happened to you, Dr. Taliaferro?” asked a man in front.

“I wish I knew.”
The avatar had Taliaferro's personality, and whatever knowledge the data systems had been able to load into him, and whatever Taliaferro himself had chosen to impart.
“But I honestly have no idea.”

There was a collector's room, filled with books about the event,
Polaris
uniforms, models, games, pictures of the captain and passengers. And there again was Ormond's painting of Dunninger gazing across the country graveyard. Several dealers had lines of clothing emblazoned with the ship's seal. The most interesting item, I thought, was a set of four books certified as being from Maddy's personal library. I'd have expected treatises on navigation and superluminal maintenance. Instead, I saw Plato,
Tulisofala, Lovell, and Sim's
Man and Olympian.
There was more to the lady than a pilot's license and a pretty face. Had the asking price been reasonable, I would have picked them up.

My sense of the convention was that the attendees treated the entire business as a means of escape rather than a serious exercise. They weren't really as caught up in the historical
Polaris
as they would lead an outsider to believe. Rather, it was a means to make the universe a bit more mysterious, a bit more romantic, and maybe a lot less predictable than it actually was. I concluded that nobody there really believed in the alien wind. But it charged them up to pretend, for a few hours, that it just might have happened that way.

The evening was mostly hyperbole. It was part celebration, part speculation, part mythmaking. And part regret.

The wind passeth over it, and it is gone. . . .

—Psalms, CIII

The
Polaris
convention provided just what I needed: a rationale to get away from my usual routine and an evening so full of whimsy and nonsense that it became pure pleasure. When the scheduled presentations ended, the attendees threw a round of parties that extended well into the night. I got home close to dawn, slept three hours, got up, showered, and staggered over to the office. It was my half day, and I knew I could make it through to lunch. But I hoped nothing would come up that would require me to think clearly.

More calls were coming in, mostly from people outside our regular circle of customers, asking what
Polaris
artifacts we possessed, querying prices or, in some cases, making offers. The word had gotten around.

The bids were, I thought, on the high side. Even accounting for the loss of the rest of the exhibition. But Alex nodded sagely when I reported the numbers to him. “They'll be through the roof before it's over,” he said. “By the way”—he looked innocently at the ceiling but couldn't restrain a smile—“how'd it go last night?”

“It went fine.”

“Really? What did they decide about the
Polaris?
That the ghosts got them?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, I'm glad you enjoyed yourself.” He saw that I wanted to ask something. “What?” he said.

“You're sure you want to hang on to these?” I was talking about the jacket and the glass. “We could get a lot for them. Guarantees your bottom line for the quarter.”

“We'll keep them.”

“Alex, this is a period of peak interest. I agree that they'll go still higher, but that's probably a long time away. In the short term, there could be a falloff. You know how these things are.”

“Keep them.” He walked over and looked at the glass, which was front and center in the bookcase.

Next morning, CBY announced that the Mazha had been assassinated. Apparently by his son. With a knife, while the guards watched.

“Just as well,” Alex commented. “Nobody's going to miss him.”

I hadn't said anything about the call. It was embarrassing to have been a social contact of sorts with a monster. But when the news came, I told Alex everything that had happened.

“You must have made an impression,” he said.

Despite myself, I was sorry for him.

Alex was a good boss. I was responsible for day-to-day operations, and he left me to take care of things without trying to give a lot of directions. He spent most of his time entertaining clients and sources, but he always made it a point during the middle of the week to pull me out of the office and take me to dinner.

A couple of days after the convention, we went to dinner at Molly's Top of the World, which is located at the summit of Mt. Oskar, the highest peak in the area. He was excited because he'd located an early-German coal stove. The thing was worth a fortune, and the owner needed the money and wanted to make a quick sale. Usually, we simply put buyers and sellers together, but the price was so good, Alex was thinking of buying the unit himself.

We spent the hour talking about stoves and European antiques. He
solicited my opinion, and I told him sure, buy it, what can we lose? The decision made, we fell into small talk. It was late when we finished, and normally he'd have taken me home, but I had work to do, so we rode back to the office.

The house had originally been a country inn, a solitary structure built atop a low rise. It had catered to hunters and travelers until Alex's uncle Gabe bought it and had it refurbished. Alex spent much of his boyhood in it. In those early days it had been surrounded mostly by forest. There's an ancient graveyard just off the northwestern perimeter. The markers and the statuary are worn smooth from the centuries. Older boys had told Alex the occupants went wandering at night. “There were evenings,” he said, “if I was alone in the house, I hid behind a sofa.” That didn't sound at all like the Alex I knew.

Gabe had fought a long, and ultimately losing, battle against development. He'd been something of a fanatic on the subject, and he would not have approved of the surfeit of neighbors the house had acquired over the years, or the loss of large sections of forest.

It was a glorious house, four stories and lots of windows overlooking the Melony. Furnished in the reserved traditions of the previous century. Rooms everywhere, several with VR, another with workout gear, another with a squabble table, another for sitting and watching the river go by. Some rooms were held aside for visitors, and others were pressed into service to store the occasional pieces of other civilizations that Gabe had brought back from his travels.

It was completely out of sync with the other houses in the neighborhood, which were modern, sleek, utilitarian, no space wasted. Practical. Land was at a premium outside Andiquar, and you didn't find many houses that weren't part of a designed community. You'll understand then that the country house stood out. You could see it from a couple klicks away when approaching from the city. Except, of course, at night.

We passed over the Melony, adjusted course, slowed, and drifted down through the treetops.

It was about an hour after sunset. The moon was down, but the stars were out in force. The house, and the landing pad, normally lit up as we approached, but on that evening they remained uncharacteristically dark.

Alex jiggled his comm link. “Jacob,” he said, “lights, please.”

No response.

“Jacob?”

We eased gently to the ground.

“I don't think he's there,” I said, as the engine stopped, and the skimmer's exit lights winked on and threw shadows along the front and side of the house. The cabin doors opened, and a cool breeze blew through the aircraft.

“Stay put,” said Alex. He climbed out.

The area was crowded with other houses. They pushed up to the edge of the low stone wall that marked the northern and eastern perimeters of Alex's property. They were all illuminated, so whatever was going on, it wasn't a general power failure.

The landing pad is in a slight depression. Once you're down you can only see the upper stories. He started up the incline toward the front door. I got out and fell in behind him. I'd never seen the place completely dark before. Burglars are virtually nonexistent nowadays, but you never really know. “Careful,” I said.

The walkway was chipped stone. It crunched underfoot, and we could hear a mournful wind moving through the trees. Alex kept his ID remote in his ring. He strode up the front steps and pointed it at the door. It opened. But slowly. The power was low.

He pushed through. I hurried up beside him and grabbed his wrist. “Not a good idea.”

“It's okay.” He waved me back and walked into the living room. The lights tried to come on but faded almost immediately. “Jacob,” he said, “hello.”

Nothing.

Starlight came through the windows. He had an original piece of art, a Sujannais, hanging over the sofa. I was relieved to see it was still there. I stuck my head in the office. Maddy's jacket remained folded inside its display case. And the
Polaris
glass was in its accustomed place among the books. Had there been a burglar, they should have been the first things taken.

Alex came to the same conclusion. “I think Jacob just went down,” he said. “There's no sign of a break-in.”

“Did Jacob ever do a blackout before?”

“No. But AIs go down all the time.”

Actually, they almost never do.

He looked past me into the kitchen. “Maybe you should wait outside, Chase. Just in case.” He opened a cabinet door, fumbled around, and produced a lamp.

Jacob's internals were located inside a wine cabinet in the dining room. A red warning light was blinking.

The power came by way of a laser link through a dish on the roof. I went outside, far enough away from the house that I could see past the overhang. The receiver was missing. I found it on the ground in back. The base was scorched where someone had cut it down.

I told Alex and suggested he get out of the house. “Just a minute,” he said. He can be frustrating at times. I went in and dragged him out. Then I called the police.

A woman's voice responded.
“Please give your name,”
she said,
“and state the nature of the emergency.”

I complied and told her that we'd probably had a burglar.

“Where are you now?”

“In the garden.”

“Stay there. Do not go inside. We're on the way.”

We watched the front door from a safe distance, back within running range of the skimmer, so we could jump aboard and skedaddle if we had to. But the house stayed quiet, and after a few minutes lights appeared overhead. A police cruiser. My link chimed.
“You the lady who called?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, ma'am. Please stay well away from the house. Just in case.”

The cruiser assumed station directly overhead.

Alex and I had talked before about security at the office. But burglaries were so rare as to be almost unheard-of, and Alex couldn't be bothered upgrading his alarm system. “But I guess I've learned,” he said. There'd been two break-ins in the area over twelve years, and he'd been the victim of both. “We'll do something about it this time.”

“Mr. Benedict,”
said the voice from the cruiser,
“we've scanned the house. It's clear. But we'd prefer you don't go inside just yet.”

The police drifted down and landed beside the skimmer. There were two officers, male and female, both tall, neatly pressed, courteous. The male, who had dark skin and enormous shoulders and a vaguely northern accent, took charge. He questioned us about what we knew, then they went inside while we waited. After about ten minutes we were invited in, but told not to touch anything. “They used a laser on your dish,” the male said. “Took you right off-line. You're on backup power.” He was middle-aged, had been on the job a while, and obviously thought citizens should take better care of their property. Maybe invest in decent security systems. I could see it in his eyes. He had thick arms and a heavy black mustache. “We found a set of footprints that we followed out to the road. But after that—” He shrugged. “Whoever did it must have worn a suit. He left nothing we can trace.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“Have you noticed any strangers in the area? Anyone behaving oddly?”

Not that either of us could recall.

“Okay, why don't you folks look around? Let's find out what's missing.”

The thieves had taken Alex's collection of Meridian coins—about two thousand years old but not particularly valuable—and a few first editions. Nothing else seemed to be gone.

The officers linked Jacob to a portable power source, and the lights came back on. Alex activated him and asked what he remembered.

“Have I really been off-line?”
he said.
“It appears I've lost two hours, forty-six minutes.”

“Not that long after we left,” said Alex.

We watched while the AI produced pictures of the missing books and coins. The officers asked about estimated value, and they seemed to have an idea how the thieves would get rid of the property. “Anyone who's shown an unusual interest in any of this stuff?” the female asked. She looked puzzled.

We couldn't think of anyone other than Alex who had even seen the coins during the last year, although they'd been in plain sight in one of the upstairs rooms. As to the books, everybody knew about them, but they, too, weren't all that valuable.

“Mr. Benedict,” said her partner, “am I safe in assuming that you have some jewelry on the premises?”

“Yes, I do. But it's still there. I checked it.”

“Anything else you'd describe as a likely target for thieves?”

He thought it over. “Just the collectibles. Fortunately, it doesn't look as if they knew what they were doing.”

“You mean they missed the good stuff.”

“That's exactly what I mean. There are other things, a lot easier to carry than books, that they might have taken.” There was, for example, a Kulot bowl and a recorder from ancient Canada, both in the living room, and in the study a necklace worn at the beginning of the century by Anya Martain. Not to mention the
Polaris
glass and Maddy's jacket. All in plain sight.

“Odd,” he said.

Alex shrugged. “If they were smart, they wouldn't be thieves.”

The intruder had cut through the back door, which would have to be replaced. The male took a deep breath, suggesting a world-weariness. “You have the nicest house in the neighborhood, Mr. Benedict. If a thief is going anywhere, he's coming here.”

“I guess.”

He slapped the cover shut on his notebook. “I think that's about all we can do for now. If you find anything else we should know, get in touch.” He handed Alex a crystal. “Here's a copy of the record, with your case number.”