It was early evening by then. The skies were clear, and the first stars had shown up in the east. The cab passed over a pair of large islands and joined some local traffic.
Sirika appeared on the horizon. It was an unremarkable place, mostly just a refuge for people with a lot of money and an inclination to get away. Its population was only a few thousand.
Its houses were all outrageously big, and they came with columns and colonnades and pools. They all had boathouses, which looked better than most people’s homes.
We angled down toward a villa situated on a hilltop. It was modest, as things went in that neighborhood, located amid a vast expanse of lawns. There was a decent guesthouse off to one side. We drifted toward the landing pad, and Delia got on the circuit. “Welcome to Sirika, Chase.” A door opened below, and two kids, a boy and a girl, charged out onto the walkway. Delia followed behind.
The cab touched down, the kids cheered, and I disembarked. She introduced the children. They wanted to look inside the cab, so I held it a minute before paying up.
Then they ran off, accompanied by a peremptory warning from their mother not to go far, dinner’s about ready. Delia looked proudly after them until they disappeared into a cluster of trees. “It’s a long way from Andiquar,” she said, “but I’m glad you could make it.”
“I had a good book,” I said.
We went inside. It was a showy home, with high ceilings, lots of original art, marble floors. “My husband’s away on business,” she said. “He asked me to tell you he was sorry not to be here.”
She directed me into a sitting room. It was small, cozy, obviously the place where the family hung out. Two armchairs, a sofa, and a dark-stained coffee table, on which stood a metal box. Music was being piped in. I recognized Bullet Bob and the Ricochets.
“I know you’re anxious to hear why I asked you to come,” she said. “After you asked me about the Seeker, I called my aunt Melisa. She took care of me after my folks died.
She didn’t know anything about a discovery, but she and my father weren’t all that close anyhow. Aunt Melisa wasn’t interested much in outer space.
“I’d talked to her as I told you I would, and she said at first there wasn’t anything we’d care about. From my parents. But she went looking and she called me the other day to tell me about something she’d found.” Delia indicated the box.
I followed her gaze and she nodded. Open it.
Folded inside was a white shirt wrapped in plastic. It was marked with the same eagle emblem I’d seen on the cup. “Beautiful,” I said.
“Melisa tells me she remembers now that there was other stuff. Clothes, boots, electronic gear. Data disks.”
“My God. What happened to it?”
“It got tossed. She said she kept it a few years, but it looked old, and the electronics didn’t seem to do anything, weren’t compatible with anything, and she couldn’t see any reason to store it. She kept the shirt as a memento.”
“Did she get rid of the disks, too?”
“She says everything went.” She sighed. Me, too. “Which brings us to the other reason I wanted to talk to you.” She looked worried.
“Okay.”
“If you’re right, if they really did discover the Seeker, they must not have reported it.
It’s going to turn out my parents hid information from Survey.”
“Yes,” I said. “Actually, that’s the way it looks.”
“How serious is that?”
“I don’t know.” I told her why we thought they’d have kept it quiet. That they might have felt it was necessary to protect the artifact. I put the best light on it I could. But Delia was no dummy.
“No matter,” she said. “If that’s what happened, it won’t look good.”
“Probably not.”
“Chase, I don’t want to be part of anything that’s going to harm their reputations.”
She paused. Looked around the room. “You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m not sure where I go from here.”
“I’ll do what I can to protect them,” I said.
“But you won’t be able to do much, will you?”
“Probably not,” I admitted.
On the way home, I watched Insertion, the classic horror show in which superphysical emotionless humans from Margolia have infiltrated the Confederacy. They’ve come to regard the rest of us as impediments to progress, which they define in terms of enhanced intelligence and a “higher” set of moral values. These, of course, don’t seem to include prohibitions against murdering people who discover the secret or simply get in the way.
If you’ve seen it, you haven’t forgotten the desperate chase through the skyways and towers of New York City, during which the narrative’s hero, fleeing a dozen bloodthirsty Margolians, tries to get to the authorities to warn them. En route he has to use lubricating oil, electrical circuits, an automatic washer, and several other devices, to escape. The Margolians could do all the superintelligent double talk they wanted, and bend metal, and the rest of it, but when it came to the crunch, it was obvious that good old native Confederate ingenuity would win out every time. I especially liked the lubricant gig, which he used to send one of his pursuers sliding off a partly constructed terrace.
I don’t care for horror shows. In this one, twenty or so people are killed off in an astonishingly wide range of ways, most involving lots of blood, gouging, and impaling. (I couldn’t figure out why the Margolians carried those long pokers when they could far more easily dispatch folks with scramblers.) That’s a lot more murder victims than I can normally tolerate in an evening. But I wanted to get a sense of what other people had been making of the Margolian story.
Well, there you are. Insertion was fun, in a childish way. But it seemed unlikely anything like that could actually happen.
ELEVEN
We are leaving this world forever, and we intend to go so far that not even God will be able to find us.
- Ascribed to Harry Williams (Remarks as Margolians prepared to depart Earth) I’d taken pictures of the white shirt to show Alex. “You think it’s legitimate?” he asked.
“No way to be sure just looking at it. But she’d have no reason to lie.”
“I guess.” Alex couldn’t restrain a smile that illuminated the entire room. “Chase, I can hardly believe it. But we really do have a ship out there.”
“Pity we don’t have the Wescotts’ data disks.”
“The aunt really threw them out?”
“That’s what Delia says.”
“Did you check with her? With the aunt?”
“No. I didn’t see any reason to.”
“Do it. Maybe she kept something. Maybe she knows where they were taken. Maybe we can still find them.”
“You’re sounding desperate, Alex.”
But I made the calls. Delia gave me the aunt’s code. The aunt wondered if I’d lost my mind. “Put them in the trash thirty years ago,” she said.
The earliest serious efforts to settle other worlds had been made two hundred years before the Seeker and Bremerhaven flights. The pioneers, according to the history books, had been driven, not by desperation, but by a sense of adventure, of wanting to escape the monotonous and sometimes deadly routines of civilization. They’d hoped to make their fortunes on a remote frontier. They’d gone out to Sirius, and Groombridge, Epsilon Eridani, and 61 Cygni.
Those first interstellars had been slow, requiring months to make the relatively short flights to nearby stars. But thousands of people had gone, taken their families, and settled worlds deemed to be hospitable.
But none of those early efforts had prospered.
The colonies, theoretically self-supporting, encountered difficulties, weather cycles, viruses, crop failures, for which they were unable to make adjustments. Technological assistance from the home world, at first steady, became sporadic, and eventually went away.
The survivors came home.
The first successful settlement, in the sense that it actually prospered, waited another thousand years. Eight centuries after the Margolian effort.
The Seeker had been designed originally, during a burst of unbridled optimism, to move whole populations to colony worlds. On the Margolian mission it was captained by Taja Korinda, who had been the pilot of the LaPierre when it discovered a living world in the Antares system. Her second chair was Abraham Faulkner. Faulkner had been a politician at one time, had seen where things were going, and switched careers so that, if the legend was true, he could get out when he needed to.