Infinity BeachbyJack McDevitt[continued]Cyrus was apologetic. "Kim," he said, "the insertion won't work. That means the programing is useless." He looked impossibly handsome in the subdued light of the operations center. "Which means you can't detonate the payload." "That's right." She glanced up at Alpha Maxim on the screens. "We don't have time to rewrite the code." He nodded. "Mission's blown." "Maybe not," she said. "We can try to do it by the seat of our pants." "Kim, we both know it can't be done." His eyes widened. "I say we concede the effort and make the most of the moment—." "Cyrus—." "I love you, Kim. What do we care whether the star goes up or not?" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Shepard woke her at seven. Orange juice and toast were waiting. "You know," he said, "he's not a responsible commander." "I know," she said. "Do you want me—?" The juice was delicious. "Keep the program the way it is," she said. "As you wish, Kim." He was laughing at her. "And you have an incoming call. From Professor Tolliver." At seven o'clock? "Put him through," she said. Sheyel Tolliver had aged. The energy seemed to have drained away. His face had grown sallow. His beard, black in the old days, had gone to gray. But he smiled when he saw her. "Kim," he said, "I apologize for calling you so early. I wanted to get you before you left for work." "It's good to hear from you, Professor. It's been a long time." "Yes, it has." He sat propped against a couple of cushions in an exquisitely carved chair with dragon's-claw arms. "I saw you last night. You're very good." Kim had been on most of the newscasts. "I should congratulate you. You've done well for yourself." She let him see she did not like the job. "It's not the field I'd have chosen." "Yes." He looked uncomfortable. "One never knows how things will turn out, I suppose. You had planned to be an astronomer, as I recall." "An astrophysict." "But you're quite good behind a lectern. And I thought you'd have made a decent historian." "Thanks. I appreciate that." His mood darkened, became somber. "I'd like to talk to you about something quite serious, and I want you to hear me out." "Why would I not do that?" "Save the question for a few minutes, Kim. Let me ask you first about the Beacon Project. Have you any influence over it?" "None whatever," she said. "I just do their PR." He nodded. "Pity." "Why is that?" He thought very carefully about his reply. "I'd like to see it stopped." She stared at him. "Why?" There'd been some protest groups who thought triggering stars was somehow immoral, even though no ecosystem was involved. But she couldn't believe her tough-minded old teacher could be connected with that crowd. He rearranged his cushions. "Kim, I don't think it's prudent to advertise our presence when we don't know what's out there." Her respect for him dropped several levels on the spot. That was the kind of sentiment she could accept from someone like Woodbridge, who never thought about the sciences except as a route to better engineering. But Sheyel was another matter altogether. "I really think any concerns along those lines are groundless, Professor." He pressed an index finger against his jaw. "We have a connection you probably don't know about, Kim. Yoshi Amara was my great grand-daughter." "Yoshi—?" "—Amara." Kim caught her breath. Yoshi Amara had been the other woman in Emily's cab. She'd also been one of her colleagues on the Hunter, on its last mission. Both women had returned with the Hunter after another fruitless search for extraterrestrial life, this one cut short by an equipment malfunction. They'd gone down in the elevator to Terminal City, where they were booked at the Royal Palms Hotel. They'd taken the cab and ridden right off the planet. "You're right," Kim said. "I didn't know." He reached beside him, picked up a cup, and sipped from it. A wisp of steam rose into the air. "I recall thinking when I first saw you," he said, "how closely you resembled Emily. But you were young then. Now you're identical. Are you a clone, if you don't mind my asking?" "Yes," said Kim. "There are several of us spread across four generations." Save for nuances of expression, they were impossible to tell apart. "You knew Emily, then?" "I only met her once. At the farewell party before the mission left. Yoshi invited me. Your sister was a brilliant woman. A bit driven, I thought. But then, so was Yoshi." "I think we all are, Professor," Kim said. "At least, everybody worth knowing." "Yes, I quite agree." He studied her for a long moment. "How much do you know about the last voyage? On the Hunter?" Actually, not much. Kim wasn't aware there was anything to know. Emily wanted to find extraterrestrial life. And she'd cared about little else, except Kim. Emily had gone through two marriages with men who simply did not want to deal with an absentee wife. She'd shipped out on the Hunter any number of times, often on voyages of more than a year's duration. They'd found nothing, and she had come back on each occasion certain that next time would be different. "They didn't get far. They had engine trouble, and they came home." She felt puzzled. What did he expect her to say? His smile left her feeling as if she were once again an undergraduate. Was it really that long ago he had led them in work songs from the era then under study, the terraforming years on Greenway? His classroom had rocked with "Granite John" and "Lay My Bones in the Deep Blue Sea." "I think there was a little more to it," he said. "I think they found something." "Something? What kind of something?" "What they were looking for." Had it been anyone else, she would have simply found a way to terminate the conversation. "Professor Tolliver, if they did they forgot to mention it when they got back. " "I know," he said. "They kept it quiet." "Why would they do that?" She adopted her best let's-be-reasonable tone. "I don't know. Maybe they were frightened by what they'd found." Frightened? The ship's captain was Markis Kane. A war hero who had a wing of the Mighty Third Memorial Museum all to himself. He'd been killed a few years ago while attempting to rescue children during a forest fire in North America. "That's hard to believe," she said. "Nevertheless, I think it's what happened." There'd been only four people on the Hunter. Kane, Emily, Yoshi. And Kile Tripley, head of the Tripley Foundation, which had sponsored the missions. He too had vanished, and that was an odd business. Tripley and Kane had both lived in the Severin Valley in the western mountain region of Equatoria. Three days after the Hunter had returned from its mission, after the women had disappeared, a still-unexplained explosion had ripped apart the eastern face of Mt. Hope, had leveled Severin Village and killed three hundred people. Tripley had never been found after the event and was presumed buried somewhere in the rubble. Most of the experts at the Institute thought it had been a meteor, but no trace of the object had ever been found. The force of the explosion had been estimated at roughly equivalent to a small nuclear bomb. "It's all connected," Tolliver said. "The Hunter mission, the disappearances, the explosion." There'd been stories to that effect for years. It was a favorite subject of the conspiracy theorists. And maybe there was something to it. But there was no evidence, and she hated sitting here with Sheyel Tolliver talking about Mt. Hope. It saddened her to see her old teacher reduced to a believer in cover-ups and visitors from other worlds. There were all sorts of lunatic theories about the incident. Some said that a micro black hole had come to ground. They'd searched the logs of ships and aircraft on the other side of Greenway looking for an indication that the hole had emerged from the ocean. Much as researchers had a thousand years before, after the Tunguska event. As it turned out, there had been a spout under a heavy sky, so the story had gained credence. Even though everyone knew there could be no such thing as a micro black hole. Others were convinced a government experiment had gone wrong. The experiment was said by one group to have involved time travel research; by another, mass transference. Still others thought an antimatter alien ship had exploded while trying to land. "Kim," he said, "How much do you know about Kile Tripley?" "I know he was a wealthy free-lance enthusiast who wanted to make a name for himself." Tripley had been the CEO of Interstellar, Inc., which specialized in restoring and maintaining jump engines. "He was a tough-minded man, had to be in that business," Tolliver said. "Have you by any chance read Korkel's biography?" She hadn't. "He made it quite clear that Tripley wasn't going to be satisfied just bagging a bacterium somewhere. He wanted to find a thinking creature. A civilization. It was the whole purpose of the Foundation— The whole purpose of his existence." Like Emily. One of the saddest places anywhere in the Nine Worlds was the abandoned radiotelescope array on the far side of Earth's moon, designed explicitly to search for artificial radio signals. Far more versatile than anything that had gone before, it had closed down its SETI function after something over a century and a half of futility, and was eventually diverted to other uses. By now, it was obsolete, standing only as a monument to a lost dream. We're alone. There's never been a signal. Never a sign of a supercivilization building Dyson spheres. Never a visitor. There was really only one conclusion to draw. She spread her hands helplessly, wondering how to break off the conversation. "Professor—." "My name is Sheyel, Kim. "Sheyel. I'm inclined to accept whatever you say simply because it comes from you. But I'm reminded of—." "—The danger of assigning too much credence to the source when weighing the validity of an argument. Of course after this, you may categorize me as an unreliable source." "I'm thinking about it," she admitted. "You must know something you haven't told me." "I do." He rearranged the cushions. "The Hunter left St. Johns February 12, 573." St. Johns was an outpost in the Cynex system, last water hole before leaping into the unknown. "They were bound for the Golden Chalice in the Drum Nebula. Lots of old, yellow suns. First stop was to be—," he looked down at something she couldn't see, "—QCY449187, a class G. But of course they never got that far." "They had a problem with the jump engines," said Kim. "According to the record, yes. They came out of hyperspace in the middle of nowhere, made temporary repairs, and turned back. "But they didn't return to St. Johns. Kane decided St. Johns couldn't manage the problem. So they came all the way home to Sky Harbor, arriving March 30. It was ironic, of course, that the Hunter, whose owner had made a fortune repairing and maintaining jump engines, should suffer such a breakdown. But nevertheless—." There it was. "Okay," said Kim, in a tone that suggested she saw nothing out of the way in any of this. He produced another picture. Yoshi, Tripley, and Emily in Foundation jumpsuits. Yoshi had chiseled cheekbones and riveting dark eyes. A white scarf highlighted her youth. Kim saw a monogram on the scarf and asked about it. "It's a crescent," he explained. His gaze turned inward. "She liked crescents. Collected them. Wore them as jewelry. "Anyway, an hour or so after they docked at Sky Harbor, Yoshi called me." That got Kim's attention. "What did she say?" "'Granpop, we struck gold.'" "Gold?" "That's right. She said that she'd be in touch, but she couldn't say anything more for the moment. Asked me to say nothing." "Sheyel—." "It can only have one meaning." Kim tried to hide her frustration. "She might have been talking about a romance." "She said 'we.'" "Did you talk to Kane?" "Of course. He maintained nothing unusual happened. He told me he was sorry about the others, all three missing within a few days of the return, but that he had no idea what had happened to them." She sat watching him a long time. "Sheyel," she said at last, "I don't know what you want me to do about any of this." "Okay." His expression revealed nothing. "I understand." "To be honest, I haven't heard anything that persuades me they made contact. That is what you're implying, isn't it?" "I appreciate your time, Kim." He moved to cut her off. "Wait," she said. "We've both suffered losses in this incident. That's painful. Especially since we don't know what happened. My mother was haunted by it until the day she died." She took a deep breath, knowing this would be a good time to break away. But there was something else. "Is there anything you're not telling me?" He watched her for a long moment. "You mentioned contact. I think they brought something back with them." The conversation had already been too exotic for anything to surprise her now. But that statement came close. "What kind of something?" "I don't know." His eyes flickered and seemed to lose focus. "Read the accounts about the aftermath in the Severin Valley. For years after the explosion, people have claimed they've seen things in the woods. Lights, apparitions. There were reports of horses and dogs showing signs of restlessness." Kim felt embarrassed for him, and he saw it. "They abandoned the town," he said. "They left." "They abandoned it because the explosion weakened a dam. The dam was too expensive to repair so the authorities just encouraged everyone to move out. Anyway people had bad memories." "They took down the dam," said Sheyel, "because everyone was leaving. Kim, I've been there. There is something up there." She listened to the air currents circulating through the room. "Did you ever see anything, Sheyel?" "I've felt it. Go look for yourself. After dark. Do that much. It's all I ask." "Sheyel—." "But don't go alone." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Part 1 | | Home |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~HarperPrism
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