Seeker (35 page)

Alex asked whether the police had any idea who might have done it.

They replied they weren’t in a position to comment.

They advised us to be careful and call if we saw anything suspicious. “Don’t assume you’re safe,” the woman said, “simply because you’ve filed a claim. It would probably be best if you didn’t travel together. Until we sort this out.”

Nobody was much interested in archeological discoveries when the breakup of the shuttle was dominating the news. Windy tried anyway. She arranged the press conference for next day as she said she would, and Alex made the official announcement. He stood in front of a crowd of about fifteen writers and journalists — normally, for an event like this, there would have been close to a hundred — and told them Margolia had been found.

The immediate reaction was laughter and snorting. Surely he was speaking metaphorically.

No. “It’s actually there. We’ve been there.”

“Are they alive?” someone asked, to more laughter.

“No. It’s a long time dead. It’s jungle now.”

“Are you sure?” They started to calm down. “You’ve got the right place, I mean?”

“Yes,” said Alex. “There seems to be no question.”

He went on to describe what we’d seen, and what we surmised about how it had happened. Probably a passing star.

The writers kept him busy more than an hour. How long had the colony lasted before the catastrophe? How had he felt when he went inside the
Seeker
? How do you spell that? What did we estimate the population of Margolia had been when it was destroyed? Were we going back? What had led us there?

He was ready for that last one.

“I have to confess that Chase and I were not the persons really responsible for the discovery. Adam and Margaret Wescott found the
Seeker
almost forty years ago. It was a Survey mission, and when they returned they were still trying to figure out the significance of what they’d seen when both were killed in an earthquake.”

There was a flurry of questions at this point, but Alex overrode them. “Fortunately, they’d brought back a cup from the
Seeker
, and that eventually led the way for us.”

When he described what we’d found on the derelict, the room became briefly quiet.

He never mentioned the three containers of priceless artifacts that had survived in the Tinicum region nine thousand years, only to get blown apart on the shuttle.

We weren’t even out of the building before we’d heard that Casmir Kolchevsky had issued a statement describing our activities as “desecration.” He was appalled, and suggested it was time some serious legislation was put on the books to “stop the thieves and vandals who make a living looting the past.”

We got a call on the way back to the office from Jennifer Cabot, the host of
Jennifer in the Morning. “Alex
,” she said, “
I just wanted to alert you that Casmir will be on tomorrow. He’ll be talking about Margolia. I thought you might like a chance to respond
.” Casmir. Her buddy, in case there was any doubt whose side she was on.

We’d just left the traffic stream and were heading in over the newly developed homes and malls that now covered what used to be old forest west of Andiquar. Alex made the kind of face he does when flying insects have gotten into the house. “What time do you need me?” he asked.

When we got back to the office, I wondered whether he’d want me to help him prepare for his debate. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Take the rest of the day off. You’ve earned it.”

It sounded like a good idea, but there was too much to do. We were in the center of the day’s news, and calls were coming in from clients all over the world, each of whom seemed to think we had a pile of artifacts to make available. In fact, we had five, three cups, a plate, and the Abudai plaque.

We also had received more than twenty requests for interviews with Alex. This was an opportunity unlikely to come again, so I wanted to take advantage of it.

That evening, I set aside a few minutes to talk to Harry and update him on what was happening. You’re supposed to do that with avatars, so they can be more responsive to the next person who needs them. But generally people don’t bother much.

Usually, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble myself. But I couldn’t
not
do it.

I told him a fresh expedition was going out.

“Chase,”
he said,
“do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“If anybody is able to figure out what happened to Samantha and my kids, let me know.”

Okay. It’s silly. I knew he couldn’t remember them, had never known them, didn’t even know what they looked like. It was strictly his software functioning.

And maybe mine. I decided to see what I could find out.

I called Shepard Marquard at Barcross’s department of terrestrial antiquity. “I want to talk about Harry Williams, Shep.”

“Okay,”
he said.
“Congratulations on what you did. I saw the press conference. You guys are something else.”

“Thanks.”

“Wish I’d been with you. That’s some score.”
He cleared his throat.
“Information about Williams is fairly sparse. What did you need?”

“His family. How much is known about his family?”

“Did he have a family?”

“Wife. Two kids. Boys.”

“Okay.”
He glanced down at something off to his right.
“I’m looking now.”
He frowned, shook his head a few times, stared hard, laid his index finger against his lips, and finally looked up.
“Wife’s name was Samantha,”
he said.
“And yes, there were two sons.”

“Harry Jr. And—”

“Thomas. Thomas was the younger. About five when they left.”

“What else do you have?”

“That’s it.”

“Can we check off-line?”

“Can you make yourself available for dinner? I’ll be in town tomorrow. As it happens.”

“Of course, Shep,” I said. “That would be nice.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

. . .Granted in recognition of exemplary achievement in the service of mankind . . .
— From the inscription on Survey’s Person of the Year Award

Shep showed up at Rainbow looking handsome and very much the man of the evening. He brought a data chip and a couple of books. “I have some information on Samantha,” he said. “I also thought you’d enjoy watching the departure of the
Seeker
.”

“You have
that
?” I asked, delighted.

He held the chip in his palm. “Hologram record,” he said. “Reconstructed. From December 27, 2688.”

I was anxious to see it, but he shook his head. “Dinner first,” he said.

“Why can’t we take a quick look now?”

“Because this way you have to invite me up.”

“Shep,” I said, “the facilities are better at the office.”

He grinned. It was a splendid, clean, hold-nothing-back smile. “I doubt it,” he said.

So we ate at the Porch Light, and I took him back to my apartment.

We watched colonists trek through the narrow concourses of an antiquated space station. The
Seeker
had been too big to dock, so passengers were taken to it twenty at a time by shuttle. According to the narrator, it had required almost a week to lift nine hundred people into orbit and transfer them to the ship. They were all ages, not just young, as I’d expected. And there were lots of kids. Some trailed balloons and chased each other around; others were in tears. Reluctant to leave home, I guess.

A reporter conducted interviews. Everything had been translated into standard. They were headed for a new frontier, they were saying, and life was going to be better. I was surprised to hear that they expected relations between the colony and the home world eventually to be established. “
After we get things up and running.” Up and running
seemed to be the catchphrase.

I’d had the impression the colonists had all been well-off. That they were a moneyed class. But the people in the visual record looked ordinary.

There didn’t seem to be any well-wishers present to see them off. I assumed that melancholy fact rose from the cost of riding up to the station, which must have been considerably more expensive than it is today. Good-byes would have been said on the ground. Still, there was something lonely and dispiriting in that final departure.

A white placard had been left on a seat. I couldn’t read the ancient inscription, but the translator gave it to me:
Margolia or Bosom
.

It made no sense. Still doesn’t.

The last few filed up a narrow ramp and boarded the shuttle. The hatches closed, and the shuttle slipped away, while a correspondent talked about new pioneers.

Then we were standing in a room with a fireplace where several people discussed “the significance of it all.” The significance of it all seemed mostly to be gloom and doom. The colonists were malcontents. Their good sense was questionable, as were their patriotism, their motives, and even their morals. They were putting loved ones in danger. Failing to support a government to which all owed gratitude and allegiance. “
It’s the kids I feel sorry for
.”

After a few minutes we were back on the space station, looking out a wall-sized viewport at the
Seeker
. It was tethered fore and aft to supply units. Fuel and electrical cables had been run out to it. The shuttle was pulling away from its airlock, starting back.

The correspondent returned: “
So the largest single group of off-world colonists ever to leave us at one time is embarked and ready to go. And this is only part of the first wave. The
Bremerhaven
will be leaving for the same destination, wherever that might be, at the end of next month
.”

Tethers and cables were being cast off. Auxiliary thrusters fired, and the giant ship began to move away.

“In four days,”
the voice-over continued,
“the
Seeker
will enter the mysterious realm we call hyperspace. And ten months from now, God willing, they’ll arrive at their new home. And in two years, the
Seeker
is scheduled to be back to pick up another contingent.”

The correspondent was standing in the space station. He was gray, intense, pretentious, melodramatic. Behind him, the concourse was empty. “
Chairman Hoskin issued a statement this morning
,” he said, “
expressing his hope that the people departing today will find God’s blessing in their enterprise. He has offered to send assistance, should the colonists request it. Although he admits the distances involved would present problems. Other sources within the administration, who declined to be named, commented that the Republic is better off without the travelers, that, and I’m quoting here, ‘these were people who would never have been satisfied until they were able to impose their godless ideology on the rest of us
.’

“Tonight at nine, Howard Petrovna will be a guest on the
Lucia Brent Show
to discuss whether the colonists will be able to make it on their own.”

I could still see the
Seeker
through the viewport. It was turning away. Moving into the night.

“Back to you, Sabrina,”
the correspondent said.
“This is Ernst Meindorf at the
Seeker
launch.”

One of the books was a hostile biography of a singer named Amelia who was apparently well-known at the time of the departure. She threw in her lot with the Margolians and left with the first wave, had been among the people I’d been watching. She abandoned a lucrative career and apparently became a legend for doing so. But for years afterward, there were sightings of her around the world, as though she’d never gone.

Her biographer discounted that possibility, of course, and portrayed her as a darling of those persons who thought society had become repressive. “The government provides everyone with comfortable circumstances and a decent income,” she is quoted as saying. “And we have consequently abandoned ourselves to its dictates. We don’t
live
anymore; we simply exist. We enjoy the entertainments, we pretend we are happy, and we take our satisfaction from our piety and our moral superiority over the rest of the world.” But, argues the biographer, instead of fighting the good fight, she abandoned the cause and fled into the outer darkness “with Harry Williams and his ilk.” It was cowardly, he argues, but it was understandable. I wondered how anxious
he
would have been to stand against Chairman Hoskin.

“Unlikely,” said Shep. “People used to disappear. Sometimes, when you came back, you were somebody else. Sometimes you didn’t come back. You raised a fuss, you took your chances.”

The singer had been taken into custody on several occasions, usually for something called “inciting to dissatisfaction.” The author, who lived a hundred years later in better times, comments that she would have been subjected to personality reorganization “to make her happier,” except that she was too well known, and there would have been a political price.

The account ends with Amelia’s departure on the
Seeker
.

The other book was
The Great Emigration
, written early in the Fourth Millennium. It covered the movement over three centuries of disaffected groups to off-world sites. The author explained the motivation for each group, provided portraits of its leaders and histories of the resultant colonies, all of which eventually failed.

Several of the emigrations were larger than the Margolian effort, although they tended to be spread over longer periods of time. The factor that made the Margolians unique was their secrecy, their determination not to be ruled from, or even influenced by, terrestrial political forces.

The book had a picture of Samantha and Harry. She was on horseback while Harry, holding the reins, stood gazing up at her. The caption read:
Cult leader Harry Williams with girlfriend Samantha Alvarez at her parents’ farm near Wilmington, Delaware. June 2679
. Nine years before the departure of the first wave. She was about twenty, laughing, standing on the stirrups. She was considerably smaller than Harry, with long auburn hair cut well below her shoulders. And not bad to look at. She could have had her pick of guys down at the club.