Infinity Beach Read online

  Kim threw a switch, and a computer-generated image of the LK6, a modified antique transport, formed in the center of the room. The LK6 was loaded with antimatter, contained within a magnetic bubble. It was traveling in hyperspace and, within a few seconds, would emerge in the solar core. If all went well, the resulting explosion would destabilize the star and, according to theory, ignite the first artificial nova.

  A clock in the lower right-hand corner indicated the time of the image, and a counter ticked off the last seconds, simultaneously the last of the century and the last before the LK6 entry.

  Kim watched the numbers go to zeroes. The year rolled over to 600 and 580 light-years away the missile inserted itself and its payload into the heart of the star.

  Outside, the Institute people applauded. In the briefing room, the mood was strange, almost somber. Maxim was older than Helios, and there was a general sense that ending its existence was somehow wrong.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Kim, “the pictures will be in tomorrow, and we’ll have them for you at the news conference.” She thanked them and stepped away from the lectern, and they began to file out of the room.

  Woodbridge lingered, looking out the window at the Institute’s grounds. They were covered with a thin layer of snow. He waited for Kim to join him. “I wonder,” he said, “whether it’s a good idea to advertise our presence until we know who the neighbors are.” He wore a dark brown robe belted with a silver sash, and his sea green eyes were thoughtful.

  “It’s a valid question, Canon,” she said, “but surely anyone intelligent enough to develop interstellar travel would be above shooting up strangers.”

  “Hard to say.” He shrugged. “If we guess wrong, we could pay a substantial price.” He looked up at the clear, bright sky. “It’s obvious that Whoever designed the cosmos wanted to put distance between His creatures.”

  They pulled on their jackets and walked out onto a terrace. The night was cold.

  Seabright was only a few hundred kilometers north of the equator, but Greenway, despite its name, was not a particularly warm world. The bulk of its population was concentrated in equatorial latitudes.

  An array of telescopes had been set up at the north end of the terrace, away from the buildings. A technician stood beside one, talking with a girl. The telescope was pointed toward the southeast, where Alpha Maxim was just one more pinpoint of light.

  The girl’s name was Lyra. She was the technician’s daughter, probably ten years old, and could reasonably expect to live two centuries.

  “I wonder if she thinks she’ll be able to see the nova,” said Woodbridge.

  Kim stepped to one side. “Ask her.”

  He did, and Lyra smiled one of those vaguely contemptuous smiles that children use when they think adults are being condescending. “No, Canon,” she said, while her mother looked pleased. “It will not change in my lifetime.”

  Nor of her kids, thought Kim. Light was so slow.

  Woodbridge turned back to her. “Kim,” he said, “may I ask you a personal question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have any idea what happened to Emily?”

  It was a strange question, coming apparently from nowhere. But maybe not, now that she thought about it. Emily would have wanted to be here tonight. Woodbridge had known her, and he understood that about her. “No,” Kim said. “She got in that taxi and never showed up at the hotel. That’s all I know.” She looked past the telescopes. Lyra’s mother had decided it was too cold to stay out any longer, and she was ushering the child inside. “We never heard a word.”

  Woodbridge nodded. “It’s hard to understand how something like that could happen.” They lived in a society in which crime was almost unknown.

  “I know. It was hard on the family.” She pulled her collar higher to ward off the night air. “She’d have supported Beacon, but she would have been impatient with it.”

  “Why?”

  “Takes too long. We’re trying to say hello in a scientific way, but nobody expects a reply for millennia. At best. She’d have wanted results tonight.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about what?”

  “How do you feel about all this? I can’t believe you’re satisfied with Beacon either.”

  She looked at the sky. Utterly empty, as far as the eye can see. “Canon,” she said, “I’d like to know the truth. But it isn’t something that drives my life.” I am not my sister.

  “I feel much the same way. But I must admit I’d prefer it if we’re alone. Much safer that way.”

  Kim nodded. “Why did you ask?” she said. “About my sister?”

  “No reason, really. You look so much alike. And you’re both so caught up in the same issue. In there tonight, listening to you, I almost felt she were back.”

  Kim called a cab and went up to the roof. While she waited she checked her mail and found a message from Solly: Don’t forget tomorrow.

  Solly was one of the Institute’s pilots and a fellow diving enthusiast. They’d made plans several days ago to go down to the wreck of the Caledonian. That would be in the late afternoon, after the transmissions had come in from the Trent, and everyone had celebrated properly, and the media people had gone off to put together their stories.

  Kim had visited the wreck before. The Caledonian was a fishing yacht, lying in twenty fathoms, on the seaward side of Capelo Island. She liked the sense of timelessness the sunken ship evoked, the feeling that she was living simultaneously in different eras. The excursion would also provide a break from the long hours and extended effort of the last few weeks.

  The cab landed and she climbed in, touched her bracelet to the dex, and told it to take her home. It lifted, arced around toward the east, and accelerated. She heard the blatt of a horn as she left, a final farewell from someone celebrating either the blast or New Year’s. Then she was sailing over forest and parkland. Seabright’s towers in the north glittered with lights. The parks fell away into sandy beach and the cab arced out over the sea.

  Greenway was predominantly a water world. Its single continent was Equatoria, and Seabright lay on its eastern coast. At its widest, it was just over seven hundred kilometers across. The globe-spanning ocean had no name.

  The cab skimmed low over the water, crossed Bagby Inlet and the hotball courts on Branch Island. It sailed out beyond the channel, passed a couple of yachts, and began its approach to Korbee Island, a two-kilometer-long strip of land so narrow that many of its houses had ocean views front and back.

  Kim’s home, like most of the others in the area, was a modest two-story with a wraparound lower deck. It was rounded at the corners to counter the force of the winds that blew almost constantly off the ocean.

  The cab descended onto her landing pad, which was located behind the house on a platform elevated over the incoming tide. She climbed down and stood wearily for a moment, listening to the sea. The rest of the island seemed dark and silent except for the Dickensons, who were still celebrating the new year. Out on the beach, she could see a campfire. Kids.

  It had been a long day and she was tired and glad to be home. But she suspected her weariness was not a result of the sixteen or so hours that had passed since she’d left home this morning; rather it had risen from her knowledge that she’d come to the end of something important. Beacon had been launched, and the public relations aspect of it would be given over to someone else. She would go back to her regular fund-raising duties. Damned poor career for an astrophysicist. The reality was that she didn’t sparkle at her specialty, but she did have a talent for talking people into giving substantial contributions.

  Damn.

  She started toward the house and the taxi lifted off. Lights came on. The door opened for her. “Good evening, Kim,” said Shepard. “I see the program went well.” Shepard was the household AI.

  “Yes, it did, Shep. As far as we know, everything’s on schedule.” Like all AIs, Shepard was theoretically not self-aware. Everything
was simulation. True artificial intelligence remained beyond the reach of science, and the common wisdom now held that it was impossible. But one was never sure where simulation ended. “Of course we won’t really know for another twelve hours.”

  “You had several calls,” he said. “Mostly congratulatory.” He ticked off a list of names, friends and professional colleagues, and a few relatives.

  “And at least one,” she said, “that wasn’t congratulatory?”

  “Well, this one too commended you. But that wasn’t the reason he called. It was from Sheyel Tolliver.”

  Sheyel? That was a name out of the past. Sheyel had been a professor of history at the university during her undergraduate years. He’d been a superb instructor, and he’d taken an interest in her despite the fact that she was a physics major. She was somewhat adrift then. Her parents had died in a flyer accident, the first one recorded in Seabright in five years. It had happened during her second year, and Sheyel had gone out of his way for her, had made himself available when she wanted to talk, had encouraged her, reassured her, and in the end got her to believe in herself. But that was fifteen years ago. “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “Only that he wishes to speak with you. I don’t think he’s well.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Tempest.” Three hundred kilometers away.

  She was pleased that he’d remembered her. But she couldn’t imagine why he was contacting her after so many years. “That’s really strange,” she said.

  “He asked that you call him directly when you returned home.”

  She glanced at her link. It was past 1:00 A.M. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

  “Kim, he was quite specific.”

  “It’ll have to wait. I’m sure he didn’t expect me to get him up in the middle of the night.” She went into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee, talked idly with the AI for twenty minutes, and decided to call it a night.

  She showered, turned out the lights, and stood at her window looking at the breakers. The section of the sky which held Alpha Maxim had rotated up over the roof where she couldn’t see it. The fire on the beach had apparently been abandoned but had not quite gone out. She watched sparks rising into the night.

  “It is beautiful,” said Shepard.

  Something ached within her, but she couldn’t have said what it was. The tide was out and had not yet turned, so the sea was silent. She could almost have believed the ocean wasn’t there tonight, gone into the dark with Emily.

  It was hard, on this special night, to put her sister out of her mind. Their last day together had included a frolic in the surf. They’d had a rubber sea horse from which Kim kept deliberately sliding off. Help, Emily. And the beautiful woman whose image she knew she’d one day inherit had pretended endlessly to be startled anew and would splash to her rescue. That Kim would one day be Emily had made her impossibly happy. There’d been pictures of Emily at seven, and Mom had always shaken her head over them. “Why, isn’t that Kim?” she would say, knowing quite well who was in the picture.

  At the end of that afternoon, Emily had told her she was going away for fifteen months. An eternity to a child. Kim had been angry, had refused to speak as they rode home in a taxi.

  It was the last time she saw her sister. And there had rarely been a day in all the years since that she had not wished she could get that taxi ride back.

  A few months later she’d been leaving for school and her mother had sat her down and told her something had happened, they weren’t sure what, but—

  Nobody could find her. Emily was supposed to have come home, and had come back to Greenway ahead of schedule. She’d come down from Sky Harbor into Terminal City and gotten into a cab with another woman to go to their hotel. But she never got there. And nobody knew what had happened.

  Someone was walking on the beach. A woman with a dog. Despite the cold. Kim watched until they disappeared around the bend at the shoal and the beach was empty again. “Yes, it is beautiful, Shep,” she said.

  She pulled on a fresh pair of pajamas, which were of course connected to Shepard’s systems and capable of producing a wide range of sensations. The curtains rustled in a sudden breeze and she climbed into bed. Shepard turned out the lights. “Program tonight, Kim?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  “You wish me to choose?” She usually left it to him. It was more exciting that way.

  “Yes.”

  “Goodnight, Kim,” he said.

  Cyrus was apologetic. “Kim,” he said, “the insertion won’t work. That means the programming is useless.” He looked impossibly handsome in the subdued light of the operations center.

  “Which means you can’t detonate the payload.”

  “That’s right.”

  She glanced up at Alpha Maxim on the screens. “We don’t have time to rewrite the code.”

  He nodded. “Mission’s blown.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “We can try to do it by the seat of our pants.”

  “Kim, we both know that’s not possible.” His eyes widened. “I say we concede the effort and make the most of the moment—”

  “Cyrus—”

  “I love you, Kim. What do we care whether the star goes up or not?”

  Shepard woke her at seven. Orange juice and toast were waiting. “You know,” he observed, “he’s not a responsible commander.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Do you want me—?”

  The juice was delicious. “Keep the program the way it is,” she said.

  “As you wish, Kim.” He was laughing at her. “And you have an incoming call. From Professor Tolliver.”

  At seven o’clock? “Put him through,” she said.

  Sheyel Tolliver had aged. The energy seemed to have drained away. His face had grown sallow. His beard, black in the old days, had gone to gray. But he smiled when he saw her. “Kim,” he said, “I apologize for calling you so early. I wanted to get you before you left for work.”

  “It’s good to hear from you, Professor. It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, it has.” He sat propped against a couple of cushions in an exquisitely carved chair with dragon’s-claw arms. “I saw you last night. You’re very good.” Kim had been on most of the newscasts. “I should congratulate you, by the way. You’ve done well for yourself.”

  She let him see she did not like the job. “It’s not the field I’d have chosen.”

  “Yes.” He looked uncomfortable. “One never knows how things will turn out, I suppose. You had planned to be an astronomer, as I recall.”

  “An astrophysicist.”

  “But you’re quite good behind a lectern. And I thought you’d have made a decent historian.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  His mood darkened, became somber. “I’d like to talk to you about something quite serious, and I want you to hear me out.”

  “Why would I not do that?”

  “Save the question for a few minutes, Kim. Let me ask you first about the Beacon Project. Have you any influence over it?”

  “None whatever,” she said. “I just do their PR.”

  He nodded. “Pity.”

  “Why is that?”

  He thought very carefully about his reply. “I’d like to see it stopped.”

  She stared at him. “Why?” There’d been some protest groups who thought triggering stars was immoral, even though no ecosystem was involved. But she couldn’t believe that her tough-minded old teacher could be involved with that crowd.

  He rearranged his cushions. “Kim, I don’t think it’s prudent to advertise our presence when we don’t know what’s out there.”

  Her respect for him dropped several levels on the spot. That was the kind of sentiment she could accept from someone like Woodbridge, who never thought about the sciences other than as a route to better engineering. But Sheyel was another matter altogether.

  “I really think any concerns along those lines are groun
dless, Professor.”

  He pressed an index finger against his jaw. “We have a connection you probably don’t know about, Kim. Yoshi was my great granddaughter.”

  “Yoshi—?”

  “—Amara.”

  Kim caught her breath. Yoshi Amara had been the other woman in Emily’s cab. She’d also been one of her sister’s colleagues on the Hunter, on its last mission.

  Both women had returned with the Hunter after another fruitless search for extraterrestrial life, this one cut short by an equipment malfunction. They’d gone down in the elevator to Terminal City, where they were booked at the Royal Palms Hotel. They’d taken the cab and ridden right off the planet.

  “You’re right,” Kim said. “I didn’t know.”

  He reached beside him, picked up a cup, and sipped from it. A wisp of steam rose into the air. “I recall thinking when I first saw you,” he said, “how closely you resembled Emily. But you were young then. Now you’re identical. Are you a clone, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Yes,” said Kim. “There are several of us spread across four generations.” Save for nuances of expression and their hair styles, they were impossible to tell apart. “You knew Emily, then?”

  “I only met her once. At the farewell party before the mission left. Yoshi invited me. Your sister was a brilliant woman. A bit driven, I thought. But then, so was Yoshi.”

  “I think we all are, Professor,” Kim said. “At least everybody worth knowing.”

  “Yes, I quite agree.” He studied her for a long moment.

  “How much do you know about the last voyage? On the Hunter?”

  Actually, not much. Kim wasn’t aware there was anything to know. Emily wanted to find extraterrestrial life. Preferably intelligent extraterrestrial life. And she’d cared about little else, except Kim. Emily had gone through two marriages with men who simply did not want to deal with an absentee wife. She’d shipped out on the Hunter any number of times, often on voyages of more than a year’s duration. They’d found nothing, and she had come back on each occasion certain that next time would be different. “They didn’t get far. They had engine trouble, and they came home.” She felt puzzled. What did he expect her to say?