Fenn let us know that the trail had gone cold. Alex asked whether there were no suspects at all. “None,” he said. “Bolton had lots of friends and admirers. Hard to find anybody who wanted him dead. Other than his ex-wife. And maybe a few competitors.” He gave Alex a significant look.
After a while I felt the need for some time off and took a weekend to get away with my current love interest. With both of them, in fact, but that’s another story. I turned everything off so I was out of touch with the office. I’ve already admitted I wasn’t as committed to the Margolians as Alex was. Whatever else we could say about them, they were a long time dead, and it was just hard to get excited. But I spent an undue amount of time worrying about Alex, who’d become fixated.
I wasn’t surprised when I got back to my apartment and found a boatload of messages from him waiting for me. “Chase, call me when you get in.”
“Chase, call when you can.”
“Chase, we were right.”
“They’ve started finding human remains.”
“It looks as if there were thousands of them at the south pole. People who survived the event.”
Spike reported back. There was no lander on the Bremerhaven. “Excellent,” said Alex.
“Apparently they tried migrating,” Windy told us one morning in late summer. “They headed toward the poles in summer, and back to the equator in winter. The winters were long; the summer was short. But Emil thinks they were able to survive for a while.”
“How long?” Alex asked.
“They’re still putting the evidence together. But it looks like a few generations.” She took a deep breath. “Hard to imagine the courage of those people. You wonder what kept them going.”
Waiting for help to come, I thought. Hoping someone would find them.
“They built some aircraft. And Emil says he found evidence of pretty ingenious food production facilities.”
The living conditions began to emerge. The polar retreat became a large, sprawling base, much of it underground to facilitate cooling during the summer. Living quarters were necessarily spartan, but functional. Anything that got you away from the sun during solar passage must have looked pretty good.
I tried to imagine what it had been like when the planet rolled in close. How big had the sun appeared in the afternoon sky? Had it been possible even to stick your head outdoors?
The answer, according to the estimates we were getting, was a surprise. The experts were saying yes. The amount of heat in the polar regions during the hottest part of the summer was on a par with temperatures at Rimway’s equator. Hot, yes. But downright pleasant in contrast with the rest of the planet.
By the end of the year, the mission had found the remnants of a library. Several thousand volumes. “But unfortunately beyond recovery,” Brankov said. We had been to lunch with Windy and returned with her to her office to find that piece of news waiting.
Beyond recovery.
Brankov let us see the library. An interior room, no windows, walls lined with shelves, shelves filled with mush.
“Books just won’t survive long under the best of conditions,” he said. “These are the worst.” I vividly remembered the jungle and the damp humid air.
Eventually the estimate came in: “We think they managed to hang on for almost six hundred years.”
Brankov looked like a military guy. About fifty. Blond hair cut short, jumpsuit absolutely correct, diction perfect. “They couldn’t maintain their technology. Not indefinitely under these conditions. Eventually they must have simply worn out.” He looked away and shook his head. “You’d have to be here to understand what they faced.” He was in a modular hut, one of those traveling shelters. Through a window, we could see a heavy snowstorm raging.
“Six hundred years,” said Alex. Back and forth, equator to pole, every twenty-one months, while the world alternately boiled and froze.
I looked out at the balmy weather that passes for summer in Andiquar. Windy said, “I wonder if anybody ever even looked for them.”
I was thinking how they’d wanted to be left alone.
We got more news as we slid into autumn. Some of the original towns were found, the ones built by the first arrivals on Margolia. I wondered whether any part of the house we’d seen in the holograms had survived. And what had happened to the little girl posing so happily with her mother.
Alex became engrossed in Margolian research. He traveled to libraries on the continent and in the islands. He brought home extracts on the movement, which he read religiously. They were mostly from books that had appeared originally in the twenty-eighth century. A number of them had been privately printed, family histories, church records, journals. He commented that such things survive because they tend to get thrown into trunks or attics, and when they show up a couple centuries later, there’s historical interest. “So people take care of them. Reproduce them. Get through the first two hundred years,” he said, “and you have it made.”
When I asked what he was looking for, he laughed and pushed a sheaf of documents away. “The Bremerhaven,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to the Bremerhaven.”
Jacob’s call light began blinking. Transmission for Alex. “Dr. Yashevik, sir. She wants you to call when you have a moment.”
He told Jacob to connect, and moments later Windy appeared. “Thought you’d like to know. They found this at about twenty degrees south latitude.” The light changed and we were in an excavation, during a blizzard, looking at part of a building. A cornerstone, in fact, with symbols we couldn’t read. Except the number. “It says Paul DeRenne School. 55. We have no idea who Paul DeRenne is.”
“What’s the number?” asked Alex. “The year it was built?”
“That’s what they think.”
Fifty-five. “That would have to be the fifty-fifth year from the foundation of the colony,” he said.
“Probably.”
“Has anybody been willing to make a guess how long a year was out there, prior to the event?”
“They think it would have been about ten percent shorter than a standard year.”
“So the school was built about forty-nine years after the landing, terrestrial time.”
“Somewhere in there.”
“Assuming the colony was founded 2690, that would have been about 2739 by the terrestrial calendar.”
“Yes.”
“The thing hit in 2745.”
“Yeah. I wonder if they even knew it was coming when they built the school.”
Alex rubbed his forehead. “Probably not. Would the building have been tenable afterward? After the event?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Windy sighed. “If it was, you wouldn’t want to be there during summer or winter.”
“No,” said Alex. “I guess not.”
“It would have meant a lot of running around,” I said.
“They might not have had much choice,” said Alex. “It’s not as if they could have stayed a few months at the pole, and the rest of the year on the equator. They would have needed bases between. Places to stay. Maybe this became one. Spring City. I can’t imagine they were able to stay very long in any one place.”
“I’m surprised they just didn’t give up,” said Windy. She seemed saddened by the news. I think we’d all hoped the end had come quickly.
Alex smiled. “Six centuries.” He told Jacob to enlarge the cornerstone. “Incredible.” It had begun to get dark outside. Our outside. Rain clouds building. “Anything else?” he asked.
“They found a monument. Maybe the place where the colonists first set foot on the ground. Hard to say for sure. Everything’s so broken up.”
“What’s it look like?”
The lights flickered and we were standing beside pieces of stone that were being painstakingly reassembled into a wall. There were fragments of an inscription that read, when translated, On this site, and -in the name of-, and foot. And a zero.
There’d been another figure in front of the zero, possibly a nine, or an eight. Followed by C.E. “Common Era,” said Windy.
“It’s Earth-related,” said Alex, for my benefit.
“We think,” she continued, “the colonists arrived in January 2690. More or less.