“Chase, you there?”
“Oh, yes, Alex. Hi.” The windows were dark, and the lights had come on.
“They’re closing. We have to go.”
“Okay.” I took a minute and finished the section. Then I shut down the screen. “Ready when you are.”
It was raining when we went outside. We stood on the portico, out of the downpour. The campus grounds were empty, save for a couple of girls waiting in a lit doorway. Alex looked up at the sky. The storm was not likely to dissipate soon. “You find anything at all?” he asked.
“No. To be honest, I got caught up in the reading.”
“Maybe it would be a good idea to stay with the searches.”
“I know. Dumb.”
He laughed. “I understand. Collins is pretty good, but we don’t have time to go through it all.”
“I can’t imagine living the way those people had to.”
Alex smiled. “We take a lot for granted, Beautiful.”
I found Zorbas’s name in the second draft of The Grand Collapse.
He was born in Giannouli, in a Greece that, like the rest of the world, was coming apart. His parents were wealthy, and when he was ten, they moved to North America in an effort to get away from the general instability. But the Americas were as tumultuous at the time as everybody else. When he was twenty-two, he went back to Giannouli, but the place was in chaos, so he aborted and returned home.
Not much is known about him from that point until, about twenty years later, he has become director of the Prairie House. He first appears in Huntsville as a stranger approaching Abraham Cutler, with a plan to save the Apollo artifacts at a time when the Space Museum, and the entire area, was under siege by desperate mobs.
“Collins describes the attacks by thugs determined to loot the museum. The security people held on, but the area was coming apart. He quotes Mary Castle, a historian living in that period, as saying that Zorbas was determined to save the Apollo artifacts. The Dakotas weren’t especially safe either, but Zorbas was convinced he could protect them. In any case, it was far more stable than Huntsville. Cutler apparently knew him, or in any event trusted him. They put together a working generator and used it to recharge a small fleet of trucks. Then they loaded everything onto the vehicles and took it to Grand Forks, where it was stored in the Prairie House. When conditions deteriorated there, Zorbas moved the artifacts again. Cutler is out of the picture by then.
“Zorbas puts together another truck convoy. And they load it with the artifacts. But where does it go? Collins doesn’t say. He admits that there’s no way to verify that it even happened.”
When we looked at the published version, the section about Zorbas took the action as far as the Prairie House in Grand Forks. But after that, there was no further mention of what happened. We could not find a copy of Lost Cause, the Mary Castle book cited by Collins.
We spent several more days going through the material and were about to give up when I caught something. Usually it’s Alex, but my turn had come. “Shawn Silvana,” I said.
“What about him?”
“Shawn’s a female. And the big thing is that she’s still alive.”
“What else?”
“I was looking at her Coming Home to Aquarius. It’s a history of the early colonial years in space.”
“Why do we care?”
“It’s dedicated to my good friend and mentor Marco Collins.”
“And you think that she might know—”
“—What Collins really believed about the artifacts. Why he deleted the material about Zorbas. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Twenty
The problem with The Dark Age is that we’re sitting here a hundred years after it went away, and nobody yet has turned the lights on.
Shawn Silvana had fashioned a long career tracing the development of human worlds from their early outpost stage through the middle years as communities and cultures took hold, and finally evolving to their present state, in which they functioned simultaneously as independent entities and members of the Confederacy. She was based at the North American Historical Center, in Brimbury, 120 kilometers west of Winnipeg.
Brimbury was a beautiful city, a glittering array of soaring towers and wide streets, aesthetic schools and houses, most in geometrically precise positions, separated by gardens and meadows. The Historical Center was headquartered in a wide building with a flowing dome and elevated walkways.
We thought we had an appointment to talk with Professor Silvana, but when we went inside, an administrative aide apologized and informed us that she was on a field trip and that the data system had not been updated. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said. “We don’t expect her back for several months.”
My first reaction was that, since Silvana specialized in the development of planetary cultures, we would have to do some serious traveling to talk with her. But we caught a break. “No,” said the aide, “she’s in Europe. They’re doing a dig at Koratska.”
“Would it be possible to talk with her?” Alex asked.
“I can try,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
We were led into a conference room and, moments later, Shawn Silvana blinked on. We knew her, of course, from the pictures in the books. She was well into her second century, with red hair and dark skin, and a lot of animation. She looked at us curiously, took off her field hat, and sat down on a large log. We could see behind her a section of the dig site, by which I mean a large hole. Beyond that was heavy forest.
“What’s your name again?” she asked. “I didn’t have a good connection.”
“Alex Benedict. This is my associate, Chase Kolpath.”
It was dark, and the moon gleamed in the branches behind her. “Alex and Chase. That rings a bell.”
“We’re antiquarians,” Alex said.
She laughed. “Good. Excellent. Do you know what we’ve found here?”
“I have no idea,” said Alex.
“The headquarters of Andrew Boyle.”
That caught his attention. “Marvelous. Are you sure? They’ve been looking for that for centuries.”
“Oh, yes. There’s no question about it. This was his base.”
“Who’s Andrew Boyle?” I asked.
Alex responded: “He’s one of the heroes of the Dark Age. Died too soon. He was betrayed by one of his own people. If he’d survived, they might have been able to avoid some of the worst effects of the collapse.”
“Well,” said Shawn, “that’s very good, Alex. You know your material. That’s certainly part of the mythology, but God knows it’s unlikely that any one person, even Boyle, could have headed off much of what was coming. It was too late by the time he got into the fight.”
“Boyle,” said Alex, “lived during the period when the corporates and the governments were trying to get up and running again. There was a lot of turmoil, but it really seemed, for a short time, as if a transition to a more stable society was actually happening. He was a leader for the ages, and he was there at exactly the right moment. The situation had reached a tipping point, and it could have gone either way. He had a lot of support. Worldwide. After he was killed, everything came apart.”