Polaris (38 page)

“Did you have any visitors at all during the time period, say, three weeks on either side of the event?”

“We had one ship during that span. Did you wish specifics?”

“Yes, please.”

We listened while Captain Pinchot gave us chapter and verse. The vessel had been returning from the Veiled Lady and docked seventeen days before the
Polaris
incident.
“En route to Toxicon.”

Alex looked thoughtful. “When was Nancy White here?”

“In 1344. And again in 1362.”

“Twice.”

“Yes. She told me the first time that she would come back to see me again.”

“She must have been quite young. The first time.”

“She was about nineteen. Scarcely more than a child.”
Something mournful had entered his aspect.

“Tell us about it,” said Alex.

“She and her father were passengers aboard the
Milan,
which was returning from a survey mission. The father was an astrophysicist.”

Alex nodded.

“He specialized in neutron star formation, although the mission was a routine survey effort.”

“Just see what's out there.”

“Yes. There were six of them on board, not including the captain.
Like the
Polaris.
They'd been out five months and had stretched their supplies until they were exhausted.”

“So they stopped here before going on to Indigo,” I said.

“Indigo was closed down at the time, Ms. Kolpath. Undergoing maintenance. This was all there was.”

“What did you talk about?” I asked. “You and Nancy?”

“Nothing of consequence. She was excited because she had never been off Rimway before, and her first flight had taken her so far.”

“And she came back to see you years later. Why do you think she did that?”

“Actually we maintained contact during the intervening years, and in fact right up until the time she boarded the
Polaris.
”

“Really? She sent messages from Rimway?”

“Oh, yes. Not often. But occasionally. We stayed in touch.”
The avatar looked from Alex to me. He seemed lonely.

“May I ask what you talked about?”

“What she was doing with her life. Projects she was involved in. There were practical advantages for her. When her career as a popularizer of science began to take off, I served as a symbol for some of her presentations.”

“A symbol?”

“Yes. Sometimes she used me to represent an advanced life-form. Sometimes a competitor. Sometimes an indispensable friend. I served quite well. Would you care to watch one of the shows?”

“Yes,” I said. “If you could make a copy available.”

“We have several selections in the gift shop,”
he said.
“Priced quite reasonably.”

It occurred to me that one of the books,
Quantum Time,
was dedicated to a Meriwether Pinchot. “That's you, isn't it?”

“Yes.”
There was no missing the note of pride in his voice.

“Captain,” Alex said, “the
Polaris
passed close to this station during the final flight. She must have thought of you.”

The avatar nodded.
“Yes. In fact, I had two messages from her.”

“I don't suppose either of them shed light on what happened?”

“Unfortunately not. The last time I heard from her was shortly after
the event they went to observe. After the neutron star hit Delta Kay. She described it to me. Told me it was ‘compelling.' That's the word she used.
Compelling.
I would have thought witnessing the destruction of a sun called for a stronger reaction, but she was never much on hyperbole.”
He looked momentarily wistful.
“That was a good many hours before Madeleine English sent that last message.”

“What else did she have to say?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. On the way out she'd told me how anxious she was to see the collision. To see the neutron star actually destroy Delta Karpis. She said she wished I could be there with her.”

Alex looked at me. He was finished. “Captain,” I said, “thank you.”

“It is my pleasure. I don't often get to sit down with guests. People come so seldom, and they don't have time to talk. Fill the tanks, recharge the generators, thank you and good-bye.”

“Well, Captain,” I said. “I want you to know I'm pleased to have met you, and to have had a chance to spend a little time with you.”

“Thank you, Ms. Kolpath.”
He beamed. Even the uniform got brighter.

It was good to be out of the
Belle-Marie
for a bit, and we decided to spend the night. There was a suite of rooms in an area the AI referred to as the Gallery. He showed us to them, chattering the whole way.
“I have a wide choice of entertainment, if you like. Drama, athletic events, wild parties. Whatever you prefer. Or, we can simply sit and talk.”

“Thanks, Captain,” I said.

“The parties sound intriguing,” said Alex.

“You may design whatever guests you wish. We also have an inventory of historic figures, if you'd like to participate in some stimulating conversations.”

Tea with Julius Caesar.

“The keys for your rooms are at the doors. Please be sure you return them before you leave.”

The keys were remotes. Alex reached into a pocket, produced the one we'd found at Evergreen, and compared them. They didn't look much alike.

I collected mine, aimed it, and pressed the
open
function. The door folded to one side, revealing a living room. Alex showed the duplicate to the avatar. “Captain,” he said, “sixty years ago, would this key have worked on this station?”

The captain examined it and shook his head.
“No,”
he said.
“Setting and design are quite different.”

I stuck my head into my apartment. Lush curtains, polished furniture, chocolate on the coffee table. A large bed piled high with pillows. Private washroom and tub. Not bad.

“If you elect to stay five days or more,”
said the avatar,
“the fifth night is free.”

“It's tempting,” said Alex, not meaning it. The weight of centuries and the sense of decline pressed on the place. Furthermore, Meriwether felt
remote.
On
Belle,
we could be a couple hundred light-years from anybody else, but you didn't notice it. In the outstation, though, you knew precisely where you were. The nearest person was one hell of a long way off, and you were conscious of every kilometer. Alex saw me grinning. “What?” he said.

“I could use a good party.”

Markop III was hardly worth a visit. But we went anyhow, because Alex insisted on being thorough.

It was an attractive world, lots of blue water, fleecy white clouds, herds of big shaggy creatures that made great targets if you were into hunting. The weather through the temperate zones was almost balmy.

If it was inviting, however, it was also potentially lethal. Unlike the vast majority of living worlds, its viruses and disease germs loved
Homo sapiens.
So you couldn't drop a group of people onto the surface and expect to retrieve them unless you took a lot of precautions. That fact certainly ruled out tourist spots, and with them, hotels.

There was no talkative AI this time to tell us whether anything out of the ordinary had happened. Markop III had more land space than Rimway, 180 million square kilometers, much of it concealed by forest and jungle.

There had been a settlement at one time. That was ancient history, in the extreme. Four thousand years ago. The records are sketchy on details,
but the Bendi Imperium established a colony there, and it lasted about a century before the plagues began to get ahead of the medical people. They eventually gave up.

We weren't really equipped to do a major planetary scan. But we went into low orbit and took a long look. We spotted some ruins. A couple of long-dead cities, so thoroughly buried in jungle that no part of them was visible to the naked eye. In remote areas that might once have been farms, we saw walls and foundations.

We spent three days in orbit. There was nothing that looked like a viable shelter.

There'll always be a Rimway.

—Heinz Boltmann
(During an address to the Retired Officers' Association, in the early days of the Confederacy, when survival seemed problematic.)

Terranova, the new Earth, was well named. It orbited a nondescript orange star, it had a twenty-one-degree axial tilt, its gravity was a fraction of a percent below standard; it had an oversized airless moon, and there were a pair of continents that, seen from orbit, resembled Africa and the Americas.

The most remarkable aspect of the planet was that terrestrial life-forms integrated easily with the biosystem. Tomatoes grew nicely. Cats chased the local equivalent of squirrels, and the temperate zones proved to be healthful places for human beings.

But the critical piece of information for us was that the Mangles had a system of satellites in place, and it had been up and running over a century. Nobody came or went without their knowledge, and it didn't take long to find out there had been no activity during the target time period. The
Polaris
had not gone there.

The only noteworthy event during our visit to Terranova occurred when a piece of rock got too close and had to be taken out by the Hazard Control System. The HCS consists of a black box mounted on the hull that detects and identifies incoming objects and coordinates the response, which is delivered by one or more of four particle-beam projectors.

The rock at Terranova was strictly a one-beam operation. It was only the second time in my career that we actually used the device.

Serendipity was the fourth world in the Gaspar system, and our last candidate. It was effectively a collage of desert broken by occasional patches of jungle near the poles. A few small seas were scattered across the surface, isolated from each other. The equatorial belt was boiling hot and bone-dry, its vegetation consisting mostly of purple scrub. Even the local wildlife avoided the area.

Gaspar was a yellow-white class-F star. According to the data banks, the three inner worlds were all pretty thoroughly cooked. The sun was in an expansion cycle, getting hotter every year, and would soon burn off whatever life still clung to Gaspar IV. Serendipity.
Soon
seemed to be one of those cosmic terms, which really meant several hundred thousand years.

The life-forms were big, primitive, hungry. Not dinosaurs, exactly. Not lizards at all. They were mostly oversized, warm-blooded, slow-moving behemoths. Their considerable bulk was favored by the low gravity, which was about three-quarters of a gee.

The world was called Serendipity because everything had gone wrong on the discovery flight. The ship had been the
Kismet,
a private vessel operated by fortune hunters functioning several decades before the Confederacy established guidelines for exploration. Like requiring a license before external life-forms could be introduced into a biosystem.

A field team member was killed by one of the behemoths. Walked on, according to the most popular version of the story. Another had stepped in a hole and broken his leg. A marriage had disintegrated into a near-violent squabble. And the captain suffered a fatal heart attack the day after they arrived. In the midst of all that, the
Kismet
's Armstrong engines died, so they had to be rescued.

From orbit, we looked down at a surface that was dust brown and wrinkled, dried out, cracked, broken. Lots of places were emitting steam. Serendipity had the usual big moon that seems to be a requirement for large, land-based animals, and its skies were almost cloudless. It had a breathable atmosphere, and there were no pathogens known to be
dangerous to humans. If you wanted to hide someone for a few weeks or months, this would be the perfect place. Except where would a hotel key fit in?

“I was hoping we'd get lucky,” said Alex.

“Doesn't look like it. This place is primitive. Does anybody live here at all?”

He grinned. “Would you?”

“Not really.”

“We're here,” he said. “Might as well do the search. I'd guess we're looking for a cluster of modules. Some sort of temporary shelter. Anything artificial.” He was visibly discouraged.

I told Belle to run a planetwide scan.

We passed over a miniscule sea and back over desert. The place was so desolate and forlorn that it had a kind of eerie beauty. When we crossed the terminator and slipped into the night, the ground occasionally glowed with ethereal fire.

But there was nothing, no place, certainly no hotel, where anyone could have stashed visitors.

After two days, Belle reported the scan complete.
“Negative results,”
she said.
“I do not see anything artificial on the surface.”

Alex grunted and closed his eyes. “No surprise.”

“Time to go home,” I said.

He took the key out of his pocket and stared at it.
Up. Down. Lock. Unlock. Transfer funds.
“Barber was willing to kill to keep its existence secret,” he said.

Why?

I looked down at the surface and thought how nothing would ever happen there. The oversized critters would continue to chase one another down while the climate kept getting hotter. By the time survival became impossible even for these hardy life-forms, the human race would probably be gone, evolved into something else. It got me thinking about time, how it seems to move faster as you get older, how it runs at different rates in gravity fields or under acceleration. How we assume that the kind of
world we live in is the status quo, the end point of history. There'll always be a Rimway.

“You know,” I said, “we may have made an assumption about the key.”

An eyebrow went up. “Which is what?”

“That it came from around 1365.”

“Of course it did,” he said. “It was lying in the back of the shuttle.”

“That doesn't mean it belongs to that era.” I took the key from him and stared at it. “People have been barging around in the Veiled Lady for thousands of years.”

“We've ruled out planetary surfaces and outstations,” Alex said. “And we've ruled out a rendezvous with another ship. What's left?”

Not much. “Somebody else's outstation?” I suggested.

He considered it. “Maybe. Maybe we're looking for an artifact. Something left over that's not in the record.”

“It's possible,” I said. “But it can't be too old. If you're going to use it to shelter people, even for a just a few days, it has to be capable of functioning.”

“By which you mean it has to be able to hold a charge.”

“Yes. That's part of it.”

“How old?” he asked.

When did I become the professional on outstations? “I'm not an engineer, Alex. But I'd guess maybe two thousand years at the outside. Maybe not that long. Maybe not nearly that long.”

We were moving back into daylight again, watching the sun climb above the arc of the planet. “Two thousand years,” he said. “That sounds like the Kang.”

“It could be.” They'd been active in this region for a period of about twelve hundred years, beginning during the ninth millennium. After that they'd gone dormant. Only in the last century had the Kang begun showing some of their old vitality. “Belle,” I said, “has anyone other than ourselves and the Kang Republic been prominent in the exploration of the region that includes Delta Karpis? Out, say, to seventy light-years?”

“The Alterians maintained a substantial presence, as did the Ioni.”

“I'm talking about recent times. Within the last three millennia.” I realized what I'd said and must have grinned.

“That's good,” Alex said. “We're thinking big.”

“It appears,”
Belle said,
“that no one else has invested in the subject area. Other than the Commonwealth, of course.” The forerunner of the Confederacy.

Alex poked a finger at the AI. “Belle,” he said, “what kind of character did the Kang use to represent their currency? During their period of ascendancy?”

“There were many. Which currency, and during what era?”

“Show us all of them.”

The screen filled with symbols. Letters from various alphabets, ideographs, geometric figures. He looked at them, shook his head, and asked whether there were more. There were.

It was in the second batch. The fifth symbol from the key. The rectangle. The press pad. “That looks like it,” he said.

It was impossible to be certain, but it did seem to be the same character. And I thought, Finally! “Belle, please provide the position for any remnant outstation from the Kang era located within the subject area.”

“Scanning, Chase.”

Alex closed his eyes.

“We lack data,”
said Belle.
“The locations of the Kang outstations were lost during the Pandemic revolutions. The stations themselves were long abandoned by the time the polity collapsed, and apparently no one cared enough to save the details. The locations of six are known, none of which is in the area of interest. But there were substantially more.”

“But we don't know where they were located.”

“That is correct.”

Serendipity is only twelve light-years from the place where the dwarf plowed into Delta Kay. Had Delta Kay still been a living star, it would have been at almost a right angle to the plane of the local solar system, bright and yellow in Serendipity's northern skies.

“Might as well go home,” said Alex.

Belle stepped onto the bridge, blond and beautiful and wearing a workout suit. Her shirt said
ANDIQUAR UNIVERSITY
. This one, whose programing was virtually identical to the original's, enjoyed making personal
appearances. She shook her head, signaling that she wished she could help.

It was out there somewhere, a forgotten station where the
Polaris
passengers had found refuge. But where? A sphere with a diameter of 120 light-years makes a pretty big search area. “Not so fast,” I said. “How did Maddy know it was there? If there is such a place, how'd they happen to find out about it?”

“I have no idea,” said Alex.

And I remembered Nancy White at the outstation, the fact of its existence borne away by the ages.
“Given enough time,”
she'd said,
“it's what happens to us all.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nancy White. She was especially interested in things that get abandoned. Worlds, cities, philosophies.
Outstations.
”

“She knew of one in this area?”

“I don't know. She does a show that includes a tour of one of them. Chai Ping, or Pong, or something like that.” I looked at Belle.

“
Checking,
” Belle said. She leaned back against a bulkhead and let her gaze drop to the deck.

Alex wandered over to the viewport and looked down into the darkness. “I can't imagine,” he said, “that we ever thought they might have come here.”

“Had to look, Alex. It was the only way to be sure.”

Belle lifted her eyes.
“I've reviewed the show in question. White locates Chai Pong at a point eleven hundred light-years from Delta Karpis.”

Well out of range.

Alex grumbled something I couldn't make out. The air felt thick and heavy. “Maybe she found more than one.”

“It's possible,” I said.

“If so, it might be in her work somewhere. In her commentaries, her essays, her notebooks. Maybe even in another of the shows.”

“Starting a comprehensive review,”
said Belle.
“This will take a few minutes.”

“Meantime,” said Alex, “there's no point hanging around here.”

“Let's sit tight,” I said, “until we know which way we'll be going.”

Belle brightened and raised a fist in triumph.
“It's in her
Daybook
,”
she said.
“In a collection of ideas for essays and programs.”

“What does it say?” asked Alex.

“Are you familiar with Roman Hopkin?”

“No.”

“He's a longtime friend of White's. An historian who seems to have spent most of his time doing research for her. Anyhow, he discovered Chai Pong. In 1357.”

The
Daybook
appeared on-screen: