“You think there’s anything to that?”
He sat quietly for a moment, stirring his breakfast. “Probably not. But I wish we could do something.”
“You did the right thing last week,” Gabe said.
“What was that?”
“Not charging her. You not only swallowed your commission; you paid for the chess set.”
“Come on, Gabe. How could I have taken her money? I’m just glad we were able to get it.”
Gabe had ordered an upgrade for his printer. It arrived, and I took it back to him. He was in his office, looking through reports on current archeological efforts being made across the Confederacy. When you have fourteen worlds politically joined—probably seventy colonies and way stations where efforts to establish permanent outposts have a broad history ranging from dazzling success to crash landings, with all that happening across a sweep of ten thousand years—you’re going to have a lot of archeological sites. “You setting up another mission, Gabe?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. Something I can get in before I go back to the university.” Gabe loved teaching. Seminars were his style. His classroom presentations morphed into conversations with students. It was his tactic for igniting enthusiasm.
“Anything particular in mind?”
“To be honest, I don’t feel like doing any more interstellars for a while. I’m tempted to go to Ironda and just do some digging.” Ironda was a small continent on the other side of the world, named after the politically anarchist group that had initially settled there. The problem with an anarchic perspective, of course, is that anything it establishes is likely to have a short life span. The Irondans were at odds with one another for half a century before the movement collapsed. The turmoil, however, increased the value of artifacts. Especially personal items associated with the leaders, all of whom tended to be authoritarian. Gabe had always been fascinated by them.
“You want me to go along?”
“I’m probably not going to bother, Chase. At the moment I’m more interested in the Octavia business. Did you know there’s a science museum in Calvekia that used to have a virtual display of the place? Patrons could sit inside the space station and watch what was going on. They shut it down after Octavia got lost. I asked them if they could set it up for me.”
“Are they going to do it?”
He delivered that in-charge smile. How could they not? It reminded me of a time when my mom was his pilot and I was just going along for the ride, that we’d gone to the museum in Calvekia to donate artifacts. It’s a long ride, down the coast, fifteen hundred kilometers south of Andiquar. I think there were several artifacts but the only one I can remember clearly was a radio from the twenty-third-century CE that he’d found at the site of the original Mars colony. And there was something connected with Marcellus Rienke. A notebook computer. For those who don’t follow classical theater, Rienke was the fourth-millennium playwright who’s best known for .
“Why’d they shut the Octavia display down?” I asked. “I’d think there’d have been a lot more interest in the thing after it disappeared.”
“I’d have thought so too. But I guess the interest just fell off.”
“Is Alex going?”
“Yes.”
“You guys are still hung out about the space station, aren’t you?”
“I think we both feel that the families of the people who were lost deserve an answer. So do a lot of other people with connections to it.”
“I doubt you’ll get one by going down to the museum. What’s its name?”
“The Corvey Institute. And you’re probably right. But it’s worth trying. If we watch them at work, see how they operated, we might come up with an idea. You want to come along? We need a driver.” He smiled. The skimmer doesn’t need much help.
“Sure,” I said. “When are we leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
Calvekia was an hour and a half from Andiquar. We left in the late morning, rising into a bright sunlit day, turned south, and headed down the coast. Gabe settled in with something from the skimmer’s library. Alex had brought some reading along on his commlink. “What is it?” I asked.
He grinned. “.”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s okay. Brackett, the author, says that some black holes have wormholes. Or at least one does.”
“I think we already know that. We’re not planning on going through it at any point, are we?”
That caught Gabe’s attention. Alex laughed and traded glances with him. “No,” Gabe said. “Not really. If I recall, there was a lot of excitement about the research when they first put Octavia in orbit.” He shook his head. “That just seems like a month ago. You weren’t much older than a kid.”
Nobody spoke for several minutes. Then Gabe started breathing loudly, the way he does when he thinks a conversation has gone off the rails. “You know,” he said, “we’ve had interstellars for thousands of years, and most of the galaxy is still unknown country. I’m not sure I understand why there’s so much enthusiasm about finding a way to cross over to Andromeda. Let alone find a new universe.” He looked in my direction. “I’m talking here preferably about one with stars.”
Nobody likes to talk about this, but we live in a dark age for science. And it’s never going to change. We still talk about research, but it’s really, as someone once said, not much more than stamp collecting. Scientists get excited by life-forms nobody’s ever seen before, and add them to the catalog. And we visit new worlds and record the differences among them and whatever else we encounter. Blufield has a wider oxygen-nitrogen split than any other Earth-type planet. Parmentier has the widest ranges of temperatures. Barnicle has the highest mountain. And that’s what constitutes serious science today. The remaining questions that have evaded us for thousands of years are still there, and probably always will be: How big is the universe? Does it have an edge? And if so, what would that look like? And what came before the big bang? I guess the bottom line will always be whether life has meaning.
I don’t think there’s been a serious scientific breakthrough for centuries. And I suspect that was the reason for the enthusiasm about wormholes. Most of the people who used to become scientists are now probably training as architects.
The Corvey Institute is located in the center of Crystopolis. Cities on Rimway, of course, and for that matter throughout the Confederacy, are generally unlike cities on the home world. They are not crowded, they are not tight clusters of skyscrapers jammed together, and they are not places where kids grow up thinking that concrete is the natural condition of the ground, where trees and bushes are occasional ornaments and fields are connected to sports.
Crystopolis is a typical example of the interstellar city. Groves, meadows, and parks are everywhere. There are only a handful of modest-sized towers, all rising with a kind of simplistic utility, all surrounded by greenery. Columns are rare, in fact almost nonexistent, as are domes, arcades, cornices, and porticos. We do seem to have a taste, though, for spires. Trolleys run almost silently. Some cities use them on bridges to connect rooftops, though Crystopolis is not one of them.
We came down in the institute’s parking area, went inside, and made our way to the director’s office. The secretary’s desk invited us to be seated and informed us the director would be with us shortly.