It was becoming apparent that the Seeker had indeed been carrying a full load of passengers. Nine hundred people. Had they all been kids? “Where were they going?” I asked. “I don’t think any of the original flights out to the colony carried mostly children.”
“An evacuation,” said Alex.
“From what?”
“I’ve no idea.” He pushed away something that had floated in front of his helmet. “It would have been slower up here.”
I knew what he meant, and I didn’t even want to think about it.
He pressed a gloved hand against the bulkhead as if to read its secrets. “Where were they coming from?”
Our air supply was dwindling, so we went back to the Belle-Marie. Neither of us said much. If I’d had my way, we would have called the whole thing off at that point and gone home. Let Survey or somebody else deal with it. It was odd. I’ve gone into more than a few archeological sites with Alex, but this was different from anything I’d experienced before. Or ever would again.
But he was determined to find out what had happened. So after an hour or so, and showers, we got fresh air tanks and went back.
First stop that trip was the bridge. We found it on deck four. It was smaller than I’d expected. And that surprised me. Big ship, you figure oversized bridge. There was nobody strapped in the seats, for which I was grateful. God knows what had gone through the captain’s mind during all that.
I didn’t recognize much about the equipment. There were some toggles and push buttons. But with the power off, the space wasn’t much more than two chairs in an otherwise empty room with a blank control panel and blank bulkheads, and I couldn’t have read the language without help anyhow.
“Any chance of getting the log?” Alex asked.
“No. Whatever was recorded isn’t still there after all this time.”
“Pity.” He was looking around, hoping to find something reassuring in the midst of that disaster. There was a plaque mounted on the bulkhead to the left of the pilot’s seat. It had a silhouette of the Seeker, and when we gave Belle a look, she said it was an award for carrying the first settlers to Abudai.
“Where?” Alex asked.
“Abudai.”
He looked at me. “You ever hear of it?”
“Nope.”
“The settlement shut down after forty years or so,” said Belle. “It consisted of a group that disapproved of technology. They were trying to hold on to the old days.”
“What happened to it?”
“It didn’t work. As the children matured, they packed up and went back to Earth.”
I’d brought a generator with me and managed to tie it in, but it was a fool’s errand.
The system wasn’t going to take a charge. The ship was dead as a rock.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Alex, “if Survey made a monument out of the thing.
Or an historic preserve.”
I wasn’t sure which was the pilot’s seat. I imagined Taja and Abraham Faulkner sitting there during the long flights out from Earth. I wondered what they’d talked about. What they’d thought of Harry Williams. How they’d felt about their passengers.
If either of them had been on board during this final flight.
I must have mentioned the pilots’ names because Alex pointed out that we really didn’t know when the Seeker had come to rest where it was. “It might have been a long time after the settlers arrived,” he said. “Taja and Faulkner could have been dead a hundred years before this happened.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “It’s not likely the Seeker would have lasted out here more than a century. Even with world-class maintenance.”
I opened some of the panels and looked inside, to see what condition the black boxes were in. These were the control systems for communication, navigation, power, life support, and so on. And probably for the AI. If they’d had one.
And I noticed something odd.
The boxes were marked. Plates carried symbols that probably indicated a manufacturer and a part number. And maybe a date. Some also had the group of characters that I now knew translated to Seeker. Several others had a different group of symbols, but done in the same style. It was always the same group. “Belle,” I said, “what’s this mean?”
“Please hold it higher so I can see. Ah, yes. That says Bremerhaven.”
“Bremerhaven?” said Alex.
“That is correct.”
“The other ship on the mission.” He frowned. “But this is the Seeker. ”
“Yeah.”
“Then those are parts from the Bremerhaven? Is that what it means, Chase?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“Are they critical parts?”
“I don’t know anything about third-millennium ships. I mean this thing’s an antique.”
“Best guess.”
“They’re part of the basic package. On the bridge. Connected to whatever controls the captain has. Yeah. I’d say they were probably critical.”
There were storerooms, some filled with supplies that had never been used, others lined with cabinets. We broke into a few of the cabinets and found lots of baggage. It was all frozen rock solid.
There was no shortage of artifacts. Mugs and glasses, like the one Amy Kolmer had brought to the office, were stored in cabinets in the dining areas. Most of the glasses were cracked, but some had survived intact. We filled several containers with them.
“No problem about our deal with Shara,” he said. “There’s plenty here for everybody.”
Our customers were going to love this stuff. We took some lamps, dinnerware, pens, whatever. We especially liked anything that was marked with the Seeker ’s name. The ship also had a substantial stock of toys. Stuffed animals and books designed for children and pull-toys and sets of blocks and play pistols. Not much of it was in what you’d call pristine condition. But considering the age of everything, it was pretty good.
I’d have preferred to complete an investigation before we started taking things out, but the ship was so big, and there was so much. We’d go from space to space, and Alex would say, look, there’s a reader, or maybe a device that we didn’t recognize, or maybe a towel-stiff as a board but still recognizably a towel-and we’d pick it up and soon we were hauling a lot of stuff around with us. We took what we had back to the Belle Marie. When we got outside, Alex, his arms full, lost his grip on the load.
Everything drifted away, but he managed to save the Abudai plaque.
I mention all this to impress on the reader that there was a fair degree of disorganization in the way we went about things. We were driven by competing motives, by our desire to know what had happened to the Seeker, and consequently to Margolia itself; and also by our hunt for salable artifacts. And maybe a little guilt associated with taking things from this particular site. Don’t ask me why. We’d never had that problem before.
“I almost wish there weren’t so much here,” said Alex. I knew what he meant. If only a limited number of artifacts from the Seeker existed, they would command extraordinary prices. But if a boatload came back, even if that boatload were restricted by Survey to museums and exhibits, their very existence would reduce the value of what we had to sell.
Well, no help for it.
We’d just gotten inside when Belle called over. “I think I sighted another ship.”
“Where, Belle?”
“It’s gone now. Might have been just a blip. It wasn’t on the scope long enough to get a fix.”
“Nearby?”
“Thirty million klicks. There’s an asteroid ring at that range.”
“Okay. Let us know if it shows up again.”
EIGHTEEN
Modern technology has made time travel possible. Not in the classic style, of course. Bouncing back and forth through the centuries appears to be forever beyond reach. We cannot go back to inform Caesar that it would be a good idea to stay out of the forum during March. But we can return to his world, and listen to his thoughts, and hear his heart beat.
- Jasmine Kalanna,
Voyages, 1365 You wander through something like the Seeker and you think about the federations and governments that have lived and died while that ship and its silent passengers moved along its solitary orbit. There had been dark ages and commercial revolutions and environmental disasters. Religions had been born, prospered, and vanished.