Polaris Read online

  If he was wrong in his predictions, Urquhart was nevertheless an able speaker. He was persuasive, passionate, self-deprecating. “Too many babies,” he’d said. “We need to slow down a bit. And let nature catch her breath.”

  Corporate Rimway had wanted a growing population precisely because it brought rising prices. And they’d gone after him with a vengeance. “Urquhart Doesn’t Like Children!” became the battle cry of his opposition in 1360. Organizations like Mothers Opposed to Urquhart arrived on the scene. He refused to back down, and he was beaten.

  My kind of guy.

  I shipped everything off to the new owners, except the vest and the etui. Calder and Gold lived nearby and preferred to come to the Rainbow office to pick up their prizes.

  Under the circumstances, Alex could have renegotiated the prices with his clients. Everything had multiplied several times in value as a result of the attack. But he charged only his cost plus the usual commission. Ida responded with a bonus that didn’t begin to cover the new value of the jumpsuit. Alex tried to refuse it, but she insisted. “We did the right thing,” Alex commented afterward. “We held no one up even though the opportunity was there, and nobody would have blamed us.” Of course, Rainbow’s demonstrated integrity wouldn’t hurt its reputation in the least.

  Marcia Cable sent us a recording of herself appearing on a talk show in her area, showing off Maddy’s blouse. She was literally glowing.

  Meantime Alex found some assignments for me and sent me off around the globe to represent the company in a couple of auctions, to do some negotiating with a few Neeli who had found some curiosities in the Neeli Desert, and to fill in for him at the annual World Antiquities Convention. I was gone ten days.

  When I got back, I heard there’d been talk that Survey would make an effort to restore some of the artifacts damaged in the explosion. But there’s an odd thing about antiquities and damage. If you have, say, a vase that’s been scorched by a laser, and it happened during the useful days of the vase, it might actually enhance the value of the object. Especially if we know whose troops were firing the lasers and who was holding the vase. There’s nothing quite so priceless as a pistol that came apart while its heroic owner, say Randall Belmont, was using it to fend off the Hrin during the Last Stand. (The pistol exists, as you probably know, but I doubt there’s enough money on the planet to buy it.)

  But inflict the damage after the object is recovered from the soil, maybe by a careless archeologist cutting too close to it, and the value does a crash dive.

  So the attempt went nowhere. Shortly after the restoration rumor first surfaced, Survey announced that it was abandoning the effort. And a few days later, the entire lot of mangled pieces was sold for a song.

  Harold Estavez was delighted with White’s bracelet.

  He was tall, solemn, a man for whom a smile seemed painful. An initial impression suggested he’d never learned to enjoy himself during a long life. He was overcast and gloomy, always awaiting a storm that never arrived, convinced the worst would happen. Alex told me that Estavez felt he’d lost the one great love of his life. I suspected every other woman in the area would have bolted as well.

  “Sorry to hear about it,” I said.

  “A half century ago. He never got over it.”

  However that might have been, I had the pleasure of watching him light up when he received the bracelet.

  He called us as soon as the box arrived, and he unwrapped it in our presence. Until that moment he didn’t know precisely what he’d gotten. (He’d shushed me when I tried to tell him what we were sending.) But his eyes went wide when he saw gold. And wider still when he saw the engraved name on the bracelet.

  Nancy.

  By that time, we were getting calls from all our clients, almost everyone on the list. Everybody was interested in the Polaris. They’d all heard we’d salvaged some artifacts. Was there perhaps a piece available?

  Terribly sorry, we told them. Wish we could oblige.

  I was glad we kept the jacket and the long-stemmed glass. Alex told me he’d intended to get something for me, too, and if I liked the glass, he’d be willing to part with it. But I could read the nonverbals. He wanted me to decline. I’d have loved to have it at home in my den. But better, I thought, was to have the boss feeling indebted to me. So I told him it was okay, keep it, think nothing of it. I’d see it every day anyhow. He nodded, as if he were doing me a favor by retaining it.

  The ship’s registry number, CSS 117, had been retired ten years after the incident. No future vessel would ever be so designated. Nor, I suspected, would there be another Polaris. The people who name superluminals aren’t superstitious. But why tempt fate?

  Alex bought a lighted display case for the jacket, which went into a corner of the office, near a cabinet and away from the imager. I folded and refolded it until it looked the way it should, with Maddy’s name (which was sewn over the left-hand breast pocket) visible. We closed and locked the case, and stood for a minute or two admiring our new possession.

  But where to put the glass? We needed a place where it couldn’t be knocked over and wouldn’t get dusty. And where there’d be at least a degree of security.

  Bookshelves were built into two of the walls. There was also a Stratemeyer antique bookcase, a half century old, that Alex had inherited from his uncle. It had glass doors and could be locked. “Yes,” he said. “It’s perfect.”

  Not exactly. We had to move it out of range of the imager, so we found ourselves rearranging most of the furniture in the office. But when we were done, it looked good.

  Alex stood back to admire the arrangement, opened the bookcase doors, made room on the top shelf, and handed the glass to me to do the honors.

  Later that afternoon I got a call from Ida. “Check the news on sixteen, Chase,” she said. “There’s a weird piece about the Polaris.”

  I asked Jacob to take a look, and moments later a man and woman materialized in the office. The woman was Paley McGuire, who was one of CBY’s reporters. They were standing beside five packing crates on the dock at Skydeck. A ship’s hull protruded into the picture, its cargo doors open.

  “—In orbit around the sun, Mr. Everson?” Paley was asking.

  “That’s correct, Paley. It seemed the appropriate way to handle this.” The crates stood higher than he did. But they were, of course, in low gravity. Somebody picked one up and carried it through the cargo doors.

  “But what’s the point?” she asked.

  Everson was about twenty-five. If you could overlook his age, he had a scholarly appearance, reinforced by a black beard. He was conservatively dressed. Gray eyes, a deportment that suggested maturity beyond his years, and the long thin hands of a pianist. “In a sense,” he said, “these objects are almost sacred. They should be treated with respect. That’s what we’re doing.”

  “Jacob,” I said, “what’s in the boxes? Do you know?”

  “One minute, ma’am, and I’ll review the program.”

  Paley watched another one get hauled away. “How far out will you be going before you jettison them?”

  “One doesn’t jettison this kind of cargo,” he said. “One releases it. We’ll lay it to rest.”

  “Chase,” said Jacob, “the crates contain the debris from the bombing at Survey.”

  “You mean the artifacts?”

  “Yes. What is left of them.”

  “So how far,” asked Paley, “will you go before you release them?”

  “Just to the moon. We’re going to leave Skydeck when it lines up with the sun. When the moon lines up with the sun, that is. That’ll happen tonight. About 0300 up here. We’ll still be on this side of the moon when we let everything go.”

  “Mr. Everson, I understand the containers will be going into a solar orbit.”

  “Not the containers. We’re keeping the containers. Only the ashes will be released—”

  “Ashes?”

  “We thought it appropriate to reduce everything to ashes. But ye
s, they’ll be in solar orbit. Their average distance from the sun will be eleven point one million kilometers, which is one percent of the distance they were from Delta Kay when they were last heard from.”

  McGuire turned and looked directly at Chase. “So there you have it, folks. A final farewell to the seven heroes of the Polaris. Sixty years later.”

  I called Alex in. Jacob patched on the beginning, which consisted of no new information, and ran the program again. “You ever hear of this guy?” I asked, when it was finished.

  “Never. Jacob, what do you have on Everson?”

  “Not much, Alex. He’s independently wealthy. Born on Toxicon. Has been on Rimway six years. Owns an estate in East Komron. He runs a school of some sort up there. Morton College. It’s a postgrad school for high-IQ types. Not married. No known children. Plays competitive chess. Apparently quite good. And he’s on the board of directors of the Polaris Society.”

  “The Polaris Society? What’s that?”

  “It’s a group of enthusiasts. Branches around the world. They stage a convention in Andiquar every year. It’s traditionally on the weekend after the date that the Polaris was scheduled to arrive home.”

  “Which is—?”

  “This weekend, as it happens.”

  I asked Alex offhandedly whether he’d be interested in going. It was intended as a joke, but he took me seriously. “They’re all crazy people,” he said.

  Actually, it sounded interesting, and I said so. “They have panels, entertainment, and it might be a chance to meet some new clients.”

  He made a face. “I can’t imagine any of our clients showing up at something like that. But you go ahead. Have a big time.”

  Why not? I went to the Society’s data bank and read about them. It didn’t take long before I decided Alex was right; they were fanatics. The descriptions of the convention made the point: They read pseudoscholarly articles to each other; they played games based on the Polaris; they debated the finer points of the incident, whether the onboard lander had been disabled (some swore this had been the case); whether the AI had been a late substitution for the original system; whether the Nancy White who got on board was not the real Nancy White but an evil twin of some sort, and the real one had been living all these years in New York.

  They were meeting for three days at the Golden Ring, a midlevel hotel downtown. I showed up the first evening, just as they were getting started.

  The Golden Ring is located in the park district. Beautiful area, a patch of forest filled with streams, cobbled walkways, fountains, granby trees, and statuary. It was cold, and the fountains had been turned off. A brisk wind was blowing out of the north.

  I went into the lobby, paid my admission fee, got a badge with my name on it, collected a program schedule, and took the elevator up.

  Several meeting rooms had been set aside on the second and third floors, and events seemed to be running simultaneously in all of them. I stopped at the bar, picked up a drink, and looked around to see if I recognized anyone. Or, maybe closer to the truth, if there was anyone who might recognize me. Walking into a convention of this sort is a bit like showing up at a meeting of astrology buffs or the Gate Keepers (which, if you haven’t been paying attention, claim to have the truth about the next world), or that reincarnation group, Onward. But I was surrounded by strangers, so I figuratively pulled up my collar, and stopped outside an open door that said ALIEN WIND PANEL.

  There weren’t more than about fifteen people in the audience, maybe a quarter of the room’s capacity. But it was early yet; people were still coming in. “The alien wind,” one of the panel members was saying, “was more like a gale. It blew through the ship. It was able to do so because it consisted of anti-particles. They don’t interact with regular particles; therefore, the hull doesn’t present a barrier.” The speaker was well along in years, dignified, the kind of guy you might have mistaken for a physician, almost persuasive. But I knew just enough science to know he was talking nonsense.

  The audience seemed to take him seriously, though. At least seriously enough to agree or, in some cases, to try to refute the argument. One energetic woman protested vehemently that such a thing could not happen, and the debate wandered into talk about electrons and properties of space curvature and momentum.

  The topic was, I thought, appropriately named. I moved down the corridor to the next room.

  They were discussing whether one of the human worlds, most probably Toxicon, had sent a mission to co-opt the Polaris, grab the passengers, and put them to work in a secret project. An elderly woman whom everyone called Aunt Eva pointed out that the passengers included two medical researchers, a cosmologist, a science popularizer, a politician, and a psychiatrist. The politician and the cosmologist were retired. What sort of project would require the services of such a diverse group?

  The answer came back that the kidnappers only wanted Dunninger and Mendoza. The neurobiologists. Did the audience know they were working on life extension?

  Of course it did.

  Somebody pointed out that the way to find the culprits was to look for a world whose politicians had stopped ageing.

  The most popular explanations inevitably involved aliens. It provided an easy response to all difficulties. If there was a threatening alien presence, and the ship was ready to jump into Armstrong space, why didn’t it do so? Answer: The aliens had a device that prevented it. Why didn’t Maddy send a Code White? Same answer.

  What were the aliens up to? There was widespread disagreement. Some thought they wanted a few humans to dissect. Others, that they were measuring human capabilities. That was why they’d selected this particular mission, with its all-star passenger list. That notion led to a whole other line of thought: that the aliens lived unknown among us and might take us at any time. That they looked like humans, but inside one would find a heart of darkness.

  Some pursued a culinary argument, that the aliens merely wanted to find out whether we were digestible. Or tasty. Apparently, judging by the fact there’d been no incidents since, we did not suit their palate.

  Dr. Abraham Tolliver read a paper arguing that the Polaris was indeed seized by an alien force, that the Confederacy and the Mutes had been aware of the existence of this force since pre-Confederate times, that the long on-again, off-again conflict between humans and Mutes was a hoax. What was actually happening, he said, was that both species recognized the presence of a lethal threat “out there somewhere,” and that the war had been trumped up between two allies to mask an arms race that would provide for the day when the attackers actually came.

  The Polaris had its historians as well as its speculators. I wandered into a panel titled “Why Did Maddy Become a Star-Pilot?”

  The credit, or the blame, was laid on her father’s shoulders. Maddy was one of six kids for whom the bar was set high, for whom no accomplishment was ever sufficient to merit praise. The father, who had the unlikely given name Arbuckle, was a small-town merchant who was apparently unsatisfied with his own life and consequently sought to taste success through his children, three of whom eventually needed psychiatric help.

  One panelist thought Maddy had chosen her field in a failed attempt to satisfy him. (He was reported to have told her, at the graduation ceremony, that she should keep striving, that she could do better.) Another panelist thought she’d done it in order to get as far as possible from him.

  Tab Everson was at the convention. He was scheduled to give a presentation, so I went. When he was introduced, he received loud applause for having given proper disposition to the remnants of the Polaris artifacts.

  He thanked the audience and explained that he had been aboard the Polaris a couple of years earlier. “They call it the Sheila Clermo now,” he said, “but we all know what’s really inside the Foundation trappings.” He talked about Evergreen, which specializes in adapting crops and vegetation for use in off-world settlements, and in environmental pursuits. He had pictures of the CEO who had bought the ship, of t
he young Sheila, of the interiors, of the ship itself as it left dock on the day he’d visited. No theories anywhere, just a tour. He was in fact one of the more effective presenters of the evening.

  A young woman on a panel titled The Grand Illusion insisted she’d seen Chek Boland less than a year earlier. “It was right here, beneath the statue of Tarien Sim at the White Pool. He was just standing there, gazing across the gardens. Last summer. Last summer, it was.

  “When I tried to talk to him, he turned away. Denied everything. But I’d know him anywhere. He’s older, of course. But it was him.”

  Then there was the Black Ship session, with four panelists and a crowded room. The panelists were described by the moderator as various sorts of experts on the Polaris. Apparently all had published something on the subject, which seemed to be the prerequisite for being recognized as an authority.

  Each made a brief statement. In essence, two of them maintained there had been a black ship; the others insisted there had not.

  “What’s a black ship?” I whispered to a young man next to me.

  The question seemed to startle him. “The conspirators,” he said.

  “What conspirators?”

  “It’s the ship that took them away. Maddy and the passengers.”

  “Oh. Toxicon again?”

  “Of course not.” He might have been annoyed because I’d become a distraction to the quarrel that was breaking out in the front of the room.

  A man who looked and talked like a lawyer had the floor. “The Trendel Commission,” he was saying, “ruled that out at the time. During the incident, no interstellar was unaccounted for.”

  The idea seemed to be that a small private group, with the connivance of one of the persons on board the Polaris, had arrived in the neighborhood and succeeded in gaining entry before anyone realized their purpose. The intention was to demand ransoms for the return of the passengers. Because of their celebrity, the payoff would have been substantial.