Echo Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  PART I - The Tablet

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  PART II - Parties in Flight

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  PART III - Echo

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  PART IV - Fallout

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  Novels by Jack McDevitt

  THE HERCULES TEXT

  ANCIENT SHORES

  ETERNITY ROAD

  MOONFALL

  INFINITY BEACH

  TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE

  The Academy (Priscilla Hutchins) Novels

  THE ENGINES OF GOD

  DEEPSIX

  CHINDI

  OMEGA

  ODYSSEY

  CAULDRON

  The Alex Benedict Novels

  A TALENT FOR WAR

  POLARIS

  SEEKER

  THE DEVIL’S EYE

  ECHO

  Collections

  STANDARD CANDLES

  SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

  OUTBOUND

  CRYPTIC: THE BEST SHORT FICTION OF JACK McDEVITT

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2010 by Cryptic, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McDevitt, Jack.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44490-0

  1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.C3556E35 2010

  813’.54—dc22

  2010028545

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Ron Peifer,

  always the man of the hour

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m indebted for advice and technical assistance to David DeGraff of Alfred University, Walter Cuirle of the U.S. House of Representatives Page School, and Michael Fossel, author of Cells, Aging, and Human Disease. Thanks also to Ralph Vicinanza, for his continuing support. To Sara and Bob Schwager, for their suggestions. To my editor, Ginjer Buchanan. And to my wife, Maureen, who has to read the early version.

  Lost in the wind was the last dying echo of who we were.

  —JOSHUA KILBRIDE, DOWNSTREAM

  PROLOGUE

  LATE WINTER, 1403, RIMWAY CALENDAR

  Somerset Tuttle’s AI announced that Rachel had arrived. “Do you wish to admit her, sir?”

  “Of course, Jeremy. Tell her I’ll be right there.”

  Rachel had been upset when she called. That was utterly out of character for her. Sunset, she’d said, verging on tears—he loved being addressed by the nickname, intended by his rivals as a commentary on his career, but which nevertheless had an adventurous ring—I have to see you. No. Tonight. Please. Whatever you’re doing. No, I don’t want to tell you over the circuit. Are you alone? Well, get rid of them. You won’t be sorry.

  When he’d suggested they meet over dinner, she’d all but come apart. “Now, Sunset. Please.”

  He liked Rachel. She said what she thought, she had a good sense of humor, she was smart, and she was beautiful. Soft brown hair and penetrating blue eyes and a smile that lit up his life. He enjoyed having her with him when he attended social functions because she was inevitably the most beautiful creature in the room. The nitwits who thought he was crazy because he’d invested a lifetime trying to determine who else might be out there—the most important question of the age—could only watch enviously as he escorted her through the crowd.

  She worked for World’s End Tours, where she took people sightseeing among the stars. And over on your right is Anderson’s Black Hole. And straight ahead is the Crab Nebula. He smiled at the image and kept the smile in place to reassure Rachel that, whatever was bothering her, it would be all right.

  His great hope was that one day he would introduce her to someone not born of human stock, someone other than the idiot Mutes, of course, who’d been around so long it was hard to think of them as alien. That they would sit down over lunch with a true Other, fill the wineglasses, and talk about purpose, design, and God. That was what mattered.

  Tuttle had been looking for over a century, sometimes with colleagues, more often alone. He’d examined literally hundreds of terrestrial worlds, places with running water and bright sunlight and soft winds. Most had been devoid even of a blade of grass or a trilobite. A few possessed forests and creatures that scampered through them, and seas teeming with life. But they were rare.

  Nowhere had he seen something that might have been able to appreciate who he was and where he came from. Something that, on occasion, might have looked at the stars.

  He didn’t look forward to Rachel’s upcoming hysterics. He couldn’t imagine what it might be that had rattled a woman he’d considered, until this moment, unflappable. But he didn’t want to get involved with what was clearly a sticky personal situation. It sounded like a pr
oblem with her boyfriend, but surely she wouldn’t bring that to him. What then? Trouble at work? That had to be it. Maybe she’d gotten caught in some sort of compromising situation with one of the passengers. That was prohibited, for reasons he’d never understood.

  She’d needed fifteen minutes to get there, a stretch of time that had seemed endless. Now she stood in the open doorway, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes. Sunset straightened his shirt and opened his arms to her. “My dear, come in. What’s wrong?”

  The door and entryway were glass, and the snow-covered grounds behind her gleamed in the sunlight. Rachel’s sculpted features were frozen. The animation that fueled her loveliness was gone.

  “Sunset.” It was all she seemed able to manage.

  She was wrapped in a light jacket, too delicate for the weather. He took her by the shoulders and started to embrace her, but she pulled away. “Rachel, it’s good to have you back. Come in and sit down. Can I get you something?”

  She shook her head, holding back tears.

  He led her into the sitting room. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Oh, yes, please.” She collapsed into a chair while he got her favorite liqueur, Margo’s carousel, out of the cabinet. He poured two glasses, walked back, and handed her one. She’d taken off the jacket, and he was surprised to see that she was wearing her uniform. It was dark blue, and a captain’s silver stars rested on her shoulders. But the collar had been pulled open.

  “Now what seems to be the problem?”

  “Sunset,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper, “I need help.”

  She’d been gone three weeks. He hadn’t expected her back for another few days.

  “Of course, love. What can I do?”

  She looked up at a mural of the Milky Way, which dominated the west wall. She stared at it, sighed, shook her head, wiped away a tear. Then she picked up the glass and took a sip. Her eyes went back to the mural. “You’ve been looking your entire life, haven’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I suppose so. I got hooked when my father took me out on one of his missions.”

  “He never found anything, either.”

  “No. Rachel, nobody ever finds anything. Except Melony Brown.” Melony had come unexpectedly upon the Ashiyyur, the Mutes, centuries ago, while she was measuring solar temperature ranges. She was the lady for whom the river had been named. “Did something happen on the tour?”

  “Yes.”

  My God, she’d been caught in flagrante on the ship with one of the passengers. It would be the end of her career. “So,” he said, keeping his voice carefully level, “what happened?”

  She looked at him and suddenly he knew. It hadn’t been a tryst.

  There were stories all the time. Somebody saw lights out at Ringwald 557. Somebody else intercepted a strange communication in the Veiled Lady. A couple of people on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation came across ruins on Sakata III and came back claiming to have made the discovery of the age. Except that the lights never showed up again, the communication was never traced, and the ruins were five thousand years old, all that remained of a settlement lost to history. Just ordinary people from Flexnor, maybe, or Vikoda. Nobody knew for certain. When you’ve been running around the Orion Arm for thousands of years, history gets lost.

  A million systems that had never been looked at lay within reach. But the impulse to explore had gone away a long time ago. People had looked for centuries and found nothing more advanced than monkeys and dolphins. Somehow, for reasons still not clearly understood, the evolution of mental faculties did not generally exceed a fairly low level. Maybe it was that there was no clear survival value in drawing pictures on walls or writing poetry. Something almost unique must have happened with humans.

  “Sunset,” she said, “I saw something you’d be interested in.”

  Tuttle was accustomed to it. Aliens was a popular topic on the science talk shows, so he got a lot of invitations, and everyone knew who he was. To his colleagues, he was a man who’d wasted his life, chasing dreams. But to the more imaginative members of the general public, he was the guy they came to when they had, or dreamed they’d had, a strange encounter. They were inevitably mildly deranged. He’d expected more from Rachel.

  “So what did you see, love?”

  She started to reply, but her voice caught. She was wiping her cheek again. “It’s not good,” she said.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Finally, the tears came.

  PART I

  The Tablet

  ONE

  Antiquities are . . . remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

  —Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

  1431, TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS LATER

  “Chase, I may have found something of interest.” Alex’s voice, over the internal comm system, sounded dubious. Maybe he had something, maybe not. I was just getting ready to tackle the morning’s work, which consisted primarily of calculating charges for our clients and getting out the monthly billing notices. It had been a good year, and if current trends continued, Rainbow Enterprises would experience breakout earnings.

  Interest in antiquities tends to move in cycles, and we were currently riding a wave. People wanted not only ordinary stuff, lamps and furniture from the last few centuries, but they were getting in line for rare, and sometimes unique, items. We’d just moved a chair that had belonged to E. Wyatt Cooper for a quarter million. Cooper had departed the scene more than a century ago, after a writing career that had appeared undistinguished. But his reputation had grown since his death, and today his vitriolic essays had become a staple of the literature. One who took mockery to the highest levels could expect to be defined as “cooperesque.”

  Jacob, who’d started life as the house AI for Alex’s uncle, Gabe, had noticed the chair when it was put up for sale by a young woman who had no idea of its value. We’d intervened, getting to her before anyone else did, informed her of its value, and managed the subsequent auction. And, if you’re wondering, yes, we could have bought it ourselves at a price that would have constituted virtual robbery, but Alex never took advantage of anyone, except those blowhards and would-be cheats who deserved it. But that’s another story. Suffice to say that Rainbow Enterprises did not want to be perceived as disreputable. Our income resulted from putting clients in touch with one another. And our clients tended to be generous when they made twenty or fifty times what they’d expected for a hand mirror or a bracelet. It was essential to the business that they trust us.

  Jacob had a long history of locating valuable antiquities amid the junk offered daily at the Rees Market, BlowAway, Ferguson’s, and other online sites.

  “Take a look, Chase,” Alex said. “You’ll probably want to follow up on it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let me know what you decide.”

  I asked Jacob to show me what he had. He produced two pictures of a pale white stone tablet, taken from different angles. The tablet was rounded at the top, not unlike some of the markers in the cemetery adjoining Alex’s property. Three lines of symbols had been engraved across the front of the object. “Actual size,” Jacob added.

  It was a bit less than half as tall as I was, an arm’s length in width, and a few millimeters thick. “What’s the language?” I asked.

  “I have no idea, Chase. It looks a little like the Late Korbanic period, but the characters don’t really match.”

  “Angle it a bit.”

  The bottom wasn’t smooth. Someone had used a laser to cut it loose from its base. “It appears to be a clumsy effort,” Jacob said, “to reduce the size in order to make it fit somewhere.”

  “Or to remove it from the original site. Who’s the owner?”

  “Madeleine Greengrass. She’s a tour guide at Silesia Park.”

  “What does she have to say about it?”

  “Not much. She says it’s been a lawn decoration at her house as long as she’s been there. She’s giving it aw
ay. Wants to get rid of it. Haul it off, and it’s yours.”

  “See if you can get her for me.”

  I went back to the billings, but I’d barely started when a small, light-skinned woman appeared in the middle of the room. Her blond hair was cut short, and she looked tired. She wore a park ranger’s uniform and was in the process of straightening her blouse while simultaneously drinking from a steaming cup. The scent of coffee came through. “What can I do for you, Ms. Kolpath?” she asked, putting the cup down.

  “I’m interested in the tablet.”

  “I’m at Rindenwood,” she said. “You know where that is?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Good. Gold Range, number 12. It’s on the front porch.”

  “Okay. We’ll be over later today.”

  “It’s all yours. But you’ll need a couple of guys to haul it out of here.”

  “Ms. Greengrass,” I said, “where did it come from?”

  “It was here when I bought the house.” She looked away. I got the impression she was checking the time. “Listen, I’m running late. Take the tablet if you want it, okay? I have to go.”

  Alex was seated in the conference room, studying the pictures, which had been blown up to make the symbols clear. Behind him, an overcast sky pressed down on the windows. It was the first day of autumn. Despite the threatening weather, a few sailboats were out on the Melony. “Wish we could read it,” I said.

  “If we could, Chase, it wouldn’t be half as interesting. Jacob, get me Peer Wilson.” Wilson was an expert on all things Korbanic.

  Jacob said okay, he was already on it, and Alex wondered aloud how old the tablet was.