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 killed. 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.